So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how your wife relies on you for lovemaking. I don't feel like it's necessarily the AI company's problem to fix either.

This is what government is for, and not to stifle innovation by banning hot robot sex with your wife, but preparing your family for robot/wife lovemaking.

A job is a decision that your boss(es) made and can be taken without your consent. You don't have the ownership of your job that you do of your marriage.

Your partner in some (most?) cases can absolutely make an executive decision that ends your marriage, with you having no options but to accept the outcome.

Your argument falls a little flat.

If it says "you work 40 hours per week and have 4 weeks of paid vacation" and your employer, EVEN IN WRITING, compels you to work 60 hour weeks and not take any vacation at a later date, then your only real option is to find work elsewhere. The Department of Labor won't have your back and you likely won't have enough money to afford a lawyer to fight on your behalf longer than the corporate lawyers your company has on staff.

Many programmers don't get treated this way because of the market, but abusive treatment of employees runs rampant in blue collar professions.

Need proof? Look at how few UNPAID weeks of maternity leave new mothers are entitled to under the law. This should tell you everything you need to know.

I have personally seen women return to work LESS THAN A WEEK after delivering a baby because they couldn't afford to not do so.

But I was just trying to clarify if work contracts were a normal thing there. The original post said they weren't where you seem to be saying they are, but effectively unenforceable.

So the normal routine here is you get an offer, if you accept you get sent a contract which is signed by the employer, if it's all ok you also sign and then you get your start date. Is it different in the US or the same?

It’s perhaps customary in some places to have additional paperwork in the negotiation phase?

Single integrated written employment contracts are rare in the US for any but the most elite workers (usually executives); US workers more often have a mix of more limited domain written agreements and possibly an implied employment contract.

Is that true? I've never had a job where I didn't sign a contract (in the UK and for multinationals including American companies). I wouldn't start without a contract.

And I'm not in any rockstar position. It's bog standard for employees.

^^^ that's the thing. Contracts are by country, not by company ownership.

I worked for an F100 multinational US-based company for many years. My coworkers in the EU (including the UK at the time) got contracts. A buddy who was a bona fide rock star in the US got one. I know VPs got them.

I got nothing, as did the vast, vast majority of my US-based friends. And while I'm not a rock star, I'm pretty well known within my niche and am not a bottom-feeder. It really is as bleak as you might fear.

Plus it covers things like disciplinary procedures, working hours etc. It's really weird to me that you don't have that. Are you sure it's normal?

To address your specific point, you can mostly be fired without reason if you're a new employee. You get more rights after 2 years so companies generally have a procedure to go through after that. You can always appeal to an employment tribunal but they won't take much notice if you've been there a couple of months and got fired for not doing your job.

Someone makes a comment about how its okay for things to be replaced in specialization in business

Then someone equates it to intimacy

Then someone says its only possible in HN

Then we get into some nifty discussion of can we argue about the similarity between marriage and job contracts and first they disagree

Now we come to your comment which I can kinda agree about and here is my take

Marriage and business both require some definition of laws and a trust in state which comes out of how state has a monopoly (well legal monopoly) over violence and how it can punish people who don't follow laws over it and how the past record of it handling cases have been

As an example, I doubt how marriages can be a good mutually binding legal agreement in something like saudi arabia which is mysognistic. Same can be said for exploitations in businesses for countries, same countries like saudia arabia and qatar have some people from south asia like india etc. in a sort of legal slavery where they are forced to reside in their own designated quarters of the country and they are insanely restricted. Look it up.

Also off topic but I asked LLM's to find countries where divorce for women are illegal and I confirmed it, as an example, divorce in philipines for non muslims are banned (muslim woman's divorces are handled via sharia law) I have since fact checked it as well via searching but it's just that divorce itself isn't an option in philipines but rather limiting marital dissolution to annulment or legal separation

"In the Philippines, the general legal framework under the Family Code prohibits absolute divorce for the majority of the population, limiting marital dissolution to annulment or legal separation " [1]

[1]: source: https://www.respicio.ph/commentaries/divorce-under-muslim-pe...

That is not true far more often than it is true.

A job is also a mutual decision between the employee and the employer.

A marriage can also be taken without your consent through divorce (unless you are orthodox jewish or something I think?).

Note that isn’t universally true, for either case. Without mutual agreement, in the EU you can’t fire someone just because, and in Japan you can’t divorce unless you have proof of a physical affair or something equally damming.

But as a society we have to ask ourselves if replacing all jobs with AI will make for a better society. Life is not all about making as much money as possible. For a working society citizen need meaning in their lives, and safety, and food, and health. If most people get too little of this, it may disrupt society, and cause wars and riots.

This is where government needs to step in, uncontrolled enterprise greed will destroy countries. But companies don´t care, they'll just move to another country. And the ultra-rich don´t care, they'll just put larger walls around their houses or move country.

Maybe it depends on what you want in a relationships. AI is sycophantic and that could help people who might have trust issues with humans in general or the other sex (which is happening way more than you might think in younger generations, whether that's involuntary celebates or whatever)

I don't blame people for having trust issues but the fact that they can live longer in some idea of a false hope that robots are partners would just make them stuck even longer and wouldn't help them.

Should there be regulations on this thing depends if this becomes a bigger issue but most people including myself feel like govt. shouldn't intervene in many things but still. I don't think its happening any time soon since AI big tech money and stock markets are so bedded together its wild.

It's not solving the problem, it's diverging away from it.

I 100% agree. I mean that was what I was trying to convey I guess if I didn't get side tracked thinking about govt regulation but yeah I agree completely.

It's sort of self sabotage but hey one thing I have come to know about humans is that judging them for things is gonna push them even further into us vs them, we need to know the reasons behind why people feel so easy to conform to llm's. I guess sycophancy is the idea. People want to know that they are right and the world is wrong and most people sometimes don't give a fuck about other problems and if they do, then they try to help and that can involve pointing to reality. AI just delays it by saying something sycophantic which drives a person even further into the hole.

I guess we need to understand them. Its become a reality dude, there are people already marrying chatbots or what not, I know you must have heard of these stories...

We are not talking about something in the distinct future, its happening as we speak

I think the answer to why is desperation. There are so many things broken in the society in dating that young people feel like being alone is better and chatbots to satisfy whatever they are feeling.

I feel like some people think they deserve love and there's nothing wrong with that but then its also at the same time that you can't expect any person to just love you at the same time, they are right in thinking about themselves too. So those people who feel like they deserve love flock to chatbot which showers them sycophancy and fake love but people are down bad for fake love as well, they will chase anything that resembles love, even if its a chatbot.

Its a societal problem I suppose, maybe internet fueled it accidentally because we fall in love with people over just texts so we have equated a person to texts and thus love, and now we have got clankers writing texts and fellow humans intrepreting it as love.

Honestly, I don't blame them but I sympathesize with them. They just need someone to tell their day to. Underputting them isn't the answer but talking with them and asking them to take professional therapy as well in the process could be great but so many people can't afford therapy that they go to LLM's so that's definitely something. We might need to invest some funding to make therapy more accessible for everybody I guess.

I think it's ultimately down to risk, and wanting to feel secure. There's little risk in confiding to something you turn off, reset and compartmentalise.

You can compete, but not for long IMO. (No pun)

HN Comment in 2125: Why would I have casual sex with a real guy, I can have a sexual partner who I can tailor perfectly to my in the moment desires, can role play anything including the guy in the romance novel I'm reading, doesn't get tired, is tall and effortlessly strong, has robotic dexterity, available 24/7, exists entirely for my pleasure letting me be as selfish as I want, and has port and starboard attachments.

What makes you think that sex is some sacred act that won't follow the same trends as jobs? You don't have to replace every aspect of a thing to have an alternative people prefer over the status quo.

Sure, but we're also putting aside how people do worse without a sense of purpose or contribution, and semi-forced interaction is generally good for people as practice getting along with others - doubly so as we withdraw into the internet and our smartphones

No one is feeling useful or valued working a double shift at Walmart in order to put food on the table.

Feeling useful and valued can come from other means such as caring for the elderly and doing volunteer work.

Majority of people work to simply survive because without it, they would end up homeless and hungry.

A specific part of GP’s comment keeps getting overlooked:

  So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income.

Nobody is saying robots should replace human connection and expression

Edit: tone

Sure, humans relying on jobs for income is a problem with transitions. But people finding purpose in jobs is a problem, too.

Right now how we get there is being "forced to' -- and indeed that's a bug. But if we transition to a future where it's pretty hard to find useful work, that's a problem, even if the basic needs for survival are still being met.

I haven't had to work for 25 years. But I've spent the vast majority of that time employed. Times when I've not had purposeful employment as an anchor in my life have been rough for me. (First 2-3 months feels great... then it stops feeling so great).

But I want to be -useful-, too. I enjoy helping and working with kids in my current job more than I enjoy filling my time in empty ways (well, up to a point: summer sure feels nice, too :).

Money gave me the freedom to define the relationship with work in the way that works best for me; and it turned out that's more valuable to me than the ability to escape work entirely.

Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI? Do you have an example of what you mean?

No. I'm not saying that applies to me, but it may be getting dangerously close to many people. During my career, I've done CS, EE, controls, optics, and now I teach high school.

I do worry about CS in particular, though. If one's happy place is doing computer science, that's getting pretty hard.

LLMs feel to me like a 60th percentile new college grad now (but with some advantages: very cheap, very fast, no social cost to ask to try again or do possibly empty/speculative work). Sure, you can't turn them loose on a really big code base or fail to supervise it, but you can't do that with new graduates, either.

I worry about how 2026's graduates are going to climb the beginning of the skill ladder. And to the extent that tools get better, this problem gets worse.

I also worry about a lot of work that is "easy to automate" but the human in the loop is very valuable. Some faculty use LLMs to write recommendation letters. Many admissions committees now use LLMs to evaluate recommendation letters. There's this interchange that looks like human language replacing a process where a human would at least spend a few minutes thinking about another human's story. The true purpose of the mechanism has been lost, and it's been replaced with something harsh, unfeeling, and arbitrary.

The technology proposes a source of labor for the elites so abundant that they will not need to trade their wealth with the eaters.

However much resources you consume, it will be too much to buy for your labor. You will be priced out of existence.

The evidence for this is all around us. As automation of manufacturing has brought former luxuries into reach for middle-class families, those with means move on to consuming items that require more and more labor to produce. "Handmade" scented soaps. "Artisanal" cheeses. Nobody with money wants their wedding invitation to arrive at a destination with machine-canceled postage. It's tacky. Too automated, too efficient. In fact, I bet the ultra-wealthy don't even use postal mail for delivering their invitations, because it's not labor-intensive enough to be tasteful. Private couriers are probably the move. You can see this pattern over and over again once you know what to look for.

There will always be a demand for human labor, because value is a human construction. That said, the rate at which the economy will change because of AI (if the True Believers are to be believed) is probably too fast for most workers to adapt, so you may not be entirely wrong in your conclusion depending on how thing shake out, but the way you got there is bogus imo.

Automation results in centralization of power. It transforms labor-intensive work to capital-intensive work and reduces the leverage of the working class.

You could have a system that distributes wealth from automation to the newly-unemployed working class, but fundamentally the capital-owners are less dependent on the working class, so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution (you cannot strike if you don't have a job). You are proposing a fundamentally unstable political system.

It's like liebig's law of the minimum or any other natural law. You can try to make localized exceptions in politics, but you are futilely working against the underlying dynamics of the system which are inevitably realized in the long term.

As has been seen time and time again throughout history the commoners will only put up with so much and when all else fails and they start suffering a bit too much leverage comes from the end of a barrel.

Note that the stench of inevitability likes to sneak into these discussions of systemic problems. Nothing is set in stone. Anyone telling you otherwise has given up themselves. The comment section attracts all kinds of life outlooks, after all. The utility of belief in some sort of agency (however small) shouldn’t be surrendered to someone else’s nihilistic disengagement.

just because humans can't "outdo" technology doesn't mean we should "blame" "the elite". that's literally how the great catastrophes of socialism, communism, Marxism, etc started

Humans aren't "forced" to do anything, (depending on how you look at it). You could just lay down, "live" in your own excrement until you starve to death. That seems reasonable! Liberate the proletariat! Why doesn't everyone else work for me?!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ressentiment

If you disagree, feel free to argue your point instead of just scoffing at the idea.

It's not "just business", it's my ability to survive.

I see what you did there

Assuming that the Everdrive is M and the SNES cartridge port is F, I can understand why the Everclan men are particularly attuned to this topic. Many better-quality, more feature-rich, and cheaper SNES multicarts have hit the market; the Everdrive is looking pretty dated.

This isn't exactly news

surprised to see this so far down. if a robot can fuck better, then we would probably both have fun fucking robots together

Theon Greyjoy, you have truly lost your way

Machines doing stuff instead of humans is great as long as it serves some kind of human purpose. If it lets humans do more human things as a result and have purpose, great. If it supplants things humans value, in the name of some kind of efficiency that isn't serving very many of us at all, that's not so great.

The problem is a culture that doesn't think the profit from productivity gains should be distributed to labor (or consumers), and doesn't think that wives deserve to be happy.

Any company that solves this problem will be a $10T company.

Personal belief: if a woman finds that she isn't pleased with the type of man courting her, then maybe she should take the initiative and put in the effort to approach and court the men that she does want. Just as you likely wouldn't get the best job if you just wait for recruiters to reach out to you.

Or does it only work one way?

Men's insecurity, of course it is. That old chestnut. I'm exhausted by having to capitulate to female centric sensibilities around physical intimacy. This has been going on for decades. Your comment is endemic of the dismissive and othering nature around men's needs and experiences. Men and women are different. Unrealistic expectations from and for both is the foundational problem here.

The only good way forward is understanding, forgiveness, gratitude, and some romanticism and adoration, from and for both sexes. A nice big sun spot that wipes out social media would help too.

Can someone help me understand this one?

This is reasoning.

However people don't always act based on reasoning.

And even if you act based on reasoning, you can't trust others to act based on the same kind of reasoning.

---

If a more serious response, (some) feminists see sex robots as objectification of women and that's why they're against them.

What if there were some robot with superhuman persuasion and means of manipulating human urges such that, if it wanted to, it could entrap anyone it wanted to complete subservience? Should we happily acquiesce to the emerging cult-like influence these new entities have on susceptible humans? What if your parents messaged you one day, homeless on the street because they gave all their money and assets to a scammer robot that via a 300IQ understanding of human psychology manipulated them to sending all their money in a series of wire transfers?

Wow this potential/theoretical danger sounds a lot like the already existent attention economy; we're already manipulated at scale by "superhuman" algorithms designed to hijack our "human urges," create "cult-like" echo chambers, and sell us things 24/7. That future is already here

Humans have generally a natural wariness/mental immune system response to these things however, and for 99% of people the attention economy is far from being able to completely upend their life or send all their money in an agreement made in bad faith by the other party. I don't see why, if some AI were to possess persuasion powers to a superhuman degree, would be able to cause 100x the damage when directed at the right marks.

Besides, in this fantasy, what’s to stop you from having the perfect robot lover as well - why are you so attached to this human wife of yours in the first place?

Skill issue.

How would we handle regulating sex bots? Complete ban on manufacturing and import of full size humanoid bots? They are large enough that it could be partially effective I guess. I’m imagining two dudes in a shady meetup for a black market sale of sex bot which is kinda funny but also scary because the future is coming fast.

Or in this case, a husband having police investigate and apprehend the wife in the act? Crazy times.

Either way, without that social pattern, I'm afraid all this does is enshrine a type of futuristic serfdom that is completely insurmountable.

A total shift of human mentality. Humans have shown time and again there is only one way we ever get there. A long winding road paved with bodies.

I genuinely believe we'll see technological world war 3 in my child's lifetime. And I'm not a super supporter of that.

> Less than 5% of the US’ military budget could end world hunger for a year. [1]

My friend we live in 1984, when the main character discovers that eurasia and others have enough food / resources to help everybody out but they constantly fight/lessen it just so that people are easy to be manipulated in times of war.

I discovered this 5% statistic just right now and its fucking wild. US itself could end world hunger 20 times but it spends it all on military. I don't know if its wrong or not but this is fucking 1984. The big brother has happened. We just don't know it yet because the propaganda works on us as well, people in 1984 didn't know they were living in 1984.

And neither do we.

Have a nice day :)

Sources [1]: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/hunger-global-citiz...

Despite the cynical pessimistic tone of my comment I don't think its necessarily that humans are bad. Humans do bad things but also we still do better than any other lifeform we know of at helping each other at our own expense.

I don't think there is a good answer the same things that kept us alive as a species are what are now holding us back from becoming something better. I thinks humans will get there but like I said. Mountains of unnecessary preventable deaths first.

You think that's going to change just because many more people find themselves without?

I disagree and think you greatly underestimate the difficulty of fulfiling everyone's desires.

So: getting the whole world up to US standards of living is going to take a lot of changes to lifestyle or technological advances. Both of these are scarcity issues.

Why would the US's wasteful use of resources be the benchmark for "sufficiency"?

There's enough food to feed the world, and enough raw materials to produce the things we need. The problem is not scarcity of resources, it's distribution of resources.

“Be competitive in the market place.”

Go.

“Don’t collapse the global economy.”

:)

But what are the minimum inputs necessary to build self-sustaining robotic workforce of machines that can (1) produce more power (2) produce more robots (3) produce food. The specifics of what exactly is necessary--which inputs, which production goals--is debatable. But imagine some point where a billionaire like Elon has the minimum covered to keep a mini space-x running, or a mini optimus factory running, a mini solar-city running.

At this point, it's perfectly acceptable to crash the economy, and leave them to their own devices. If they survive, fine. If they don't, also fine. The minimum kernel necessary to let the best of mankind march off and explore the solar system is secure.

Obviously, this is an extreme, and the whole trajectory is differential. But in general, if I were a billionaire, I'd be thinking "8 billion people is a whole lot of mouths to feed, and a whole lot of carbon footprint to worry about. Is 8 billion people (most of whom lack a solid education) a luxury liability?"

I really just don't believe that most people are going to make it to "the singularity" if there even is such a thing. Just more of the same of humanity: barbaric bullshit, one group of humans trying to control another group of humans.

I don't think we will be building these things ourselves, but I think there will still be products you can just buy and then they're yours.

It would be the opposite of the "Internet of things" trend though.

If the physical asset owner can replace me with a brain in a jar, it doesn't really help me that I have my own brain in a jar. It can't think food/shelter into existence for me.

If AI gets to the point where human knowledge is obsolete, and if politics don't shift to protect the former workers, I don't think widespread availability of AI is saving those who don't have control over substantial physical assets.

There is a rush to build data centers so it seems that hardware is a bottleneck and maybe that will remain the trend, but another scenario is that it stops abruptly when capacity catches up? I'm wondering why this doesn't this become a race to the bottom?

1) It doesn't solve the problem of obtaining physical capital. So you're basically limited to just software companies.

2) If the barrier to entry to creating a software product that can form the basis of a company is so low that a single person can do it, why would other companies (the ones with money and physical capital) buy your product instead of just telling their GPT-N to create them the same software?

3) Every other newly-unemployed person is going to have the same idea. Having everyone be a solo-founder of a software company really doesn't seem viable, even if we grant that it could be viable for a single person in a world where everyone has a GPT-N that can easily replicate the company's software.

On a side note, one niche where I think a relatively small number of AI-enabled solo founders will do exceptionally well is in video games. How well a video game will do depends a lot on how fun it is to humans and the taste of the designer. I'm suspicious that AIs will have good taste in video game design and even if they do I think it would be tough for them to evaluate how fun mechanics would be for a person.

Species go extinct.

Limiting life to cell based biology is a somewhat lousy definition by the only example we know. I prefer the generalized definition in "What is Life?" by Erwin Schrödinger which currently draws the same line (at cellular biology) but could accommodate other forms of life too.

Companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on training AI models, why wouldn’t they expect to own the reward from that investment? These models are best run on $100k+ fleets of power hungry, interconnected GPUs, just like factory equipment vs a hand loom.

Open weight models are a political and marketing tool. They’re not being opened up out of kindness, or because “data wants to be free”. AI firms open models to try and destabilize American companies by “dumping”, and AI firms open models as a way to incentivize companies who don’t like closed-source models to buy their hosted services.

This is not like cell service or your home ISP; there are more choices. Not seeing where the lock-in comes from.

if your job is replaced by ai, you having ai at home doesnt change whether you're making money or not.

the capital owner gets their capital to work more effectively, and you without capital don't get that benefit

The rest you know what’s going to happen

That may be where the USA ends up. We Australian's (and probably a few others, like the Swiss) have gone to some effort to ensure we don't end up there: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/boyerlectures/1058675...

Only if the socialists win. Capitalism operates on a completely different principle: people CREATE wealth and own everything they have created. Therefore, AI cannot reduce their wealth in any way, because AI does not impair people's ability to create wealth.

Neither government or corporations are going to “save us” simply because sheer short termism and incompetence. But the seem incompetence will make the coming dystopia ridiculous

Uh...

The only way this argument does not hold is if the socioeconomic system is quickly enough and quite substantially restructured to make humans not depend on being compensated for work that is now being done by robots (not only financially but also psychologically, culturally, etc.), which I don’t see happening.

But a lot of jobs aren't like that. I doubt many people who work in, say, public relations, really think their job has value other than paying their bills. They can't take solace in the fact that the AI can write press releases deflecting the blame for the massive oil spill that their former employer caused.

I’ll note that I didn’t mention “AI”, I was addressing robots vs. jobs, but sure.

Let me straw man myself and say up front that it would be simplistic to say that if something hurts one person today then it is bad, even if it benefits a million tomorrow. However, does that mean if death of N people can cause N+1 people to be saved at some indefinite point in the future, we should jump on the opportunity?

Utilitarian math is not the answer. We don’t have to go far for examples of tragic loss of life and atrocities that were caused by people following utilitarian objectives, so I am much more wary of this logic than its inverse. We probably should neither let everybody starve while we are fighting cancer nor stop studying cancer, even if we could feed millions of people in dire need with that money.

With that in mind: feeling fulfilled and needed is important, being able to pay bills is important, etc., no matter who you are. It is probably unacceptable to reduce human life to “be the most efficient cog in the system or GTFO”.

> I doubt many people who work in, say, public relations, really think their job has value other than paying their bills.

Does your cancer research institution have no public relations department? Should there be no public relations departments in any of them? Would it help cancer research?

--

Tangentially, the Wikipedia article on inflammation makes two claims: 1) inflammation can be caused by stress—I imagine via lack of sleep, bad habits, eating disorders, etc.—and 2) cancer is one of the non-immune diseases with causal origins in inflammatory processes. Now, there’s many things that could cause a person to stress, but I imagine losing your job and struggling to make ends meet, with a promise that it helps humanity at some point, is definitely high up there (especially if you have a family). I jest, but only in part.

There's no law of nature saying that a human must work 40 hours per week or starve.

The current dependence on work is a consequence, not a goal.

Working on replacing human jobs with robots has two concrete outcomes, 1) impacting people’s ability to have jobs that pay bills and often create a meaning their lives and 2) concentrating wealth in technological elites (who run those robots), and a theoretical outcome of 3) helping humanity in some way.

If we are acting in good will, we should dedicate effort to addressing the concrete impact (1) at least as much as to working on (3). Most of us are or are adjacent to tech elites and benefit from (2), which means we are individually incentivized to not care about (1), so it requires reiterating every now and then. If we are purely thinking of (3), we are not much better than dictators and their henchmen that caused famines and other catastrophes justifying it with some sort of long-term utilitarian calculus.

This is a man-made reality though, and we have as much power to change it as we did to create it.

> Deriving satisfaction from being a useful member of society and social ties is part of human psychological nature.

I can't get behind this idea that "work" is the only way that a person can feel like a useful member of society. This is just the result of our (man-made) programming that makes it seem like the only way. We've essentially been brainwashed into accepting the backwards idea that we need work even if work doesn't need us.

> If we are acting in good will, we should dedicate effort to addressing the concrete impact

I agree, but i don't think the right answer is to stop the tech and keep digging holes and filling them in just to get a paycheck. The solution is to fix the humans. Unfortunately our government is trash so yeah we're probably screwed unless we first figure out how to get govt to actually represent the people. Andrew Yang is the only politician-adjacent I've seen take this conversation seriously.

Does it really need to be stated that “some technology would not be harmful if only the reality in which the technology was used was different”? The challenge is that reality is what it is, and even if we have a degree of control over some aspects of reality we are not at all trying to change it.

If we were the people in charge of job-subsuming robots, and we acted in good faith and common interest, we would be dedicating at least as much resources to changing that reality (in a peaceful, non-violent way) as to introducing a technology that harms a lot of people (even if we get paid for working on that technology).

> I can't get behind this idea that "work" is the only way that a person can feel like a useful member of society. This is just the result of our (man-made) programming that makes it seem like the only way. We've essentially been brainwashed into accepting the backwards idea that we need work even if work doesn't need us.

Even if what you said was true, this is a reality and for robots taking jobs to not be harmful this has to not be a reality. Are we dedicating resources to working on making that not a reality?

However, I don’t even believe this is true. Humans are inherently social. Self-awareness requires other people to exist (“self” cannot be defined without “other”); you can’t become a human without other humans because you need to be surrounded by others for something that we call “consciousness” to develop in you. We are much more ants in an anthill than solitary individuals occasionally in touch with others that we like to imagine ourselves as. For as long as humans existed, we depended on each other, and being in the void, unneeded, is subconsciously a death sentence.

There are the lucky few who find themselves needed by others without much effort, but work is a mechanism that makes the rest of us feel needed. Sure, some work isn’t the best for that, but a lot of work is, be it cancer research or opening doors for people entering a shopping mall.

> I agree, but i don't think the right answer is to stop the tech and keep digging holes and filling them in just to get a paycheck.

False dichotomy. The tech does not need to be stopped and has plenty of very useful applications outside of digging holes (e.g., cancer research mentioned by the other commenter). However, if you have XX% of population digging holes, firing them without any concern is an absolutely bad move, regardless of how good your hole-digging robots are. If you do that, all you are doing is a wealth transfer from people digging holes to people running hole-digging robots. (Remember, people digging holes also participated in the economy, paying their local butcher and baker who in turn could pay their bills, etc.)

> The solution is to fix the humans. Unfortunately our government is trash so yeah we're probably screwed unless we first figure out how to get govt to actually represent the people.

We can work on robots replacing everybody’s jobs: robotics is very challenging, but we found a way. However, to work on making a reality where everybody’s jobs are taken by robots a tenable reality? No way sir, it is way too challenging for our small brains.

If someone is arguing to limit that technology, then yes.

> but work is a mechanism that makes the rest of us feel needed

I'm guessing that you say that because you enjoy your job and it's part of your identity, which is great. But that's a luxury that not everyone has. Some people are ashamed of their jobs, or just simply hate them. But they're stuck because they can't find anything better.

I'm also sure there are tons of people in well-paying BS jobs that are glad to have a paycheck but absolutely do not feel their jobs are necessary or fullfilling. Upon realizing that their job is unecessary they are also left with the feeling that they are in fact wasting their time on this earth. So they're also stuck.

And it is surely possible to be social and to find fullfillment outside of work. I would even say that work is one of the lowest forms of socializing, one step up from sharing an elevator with a stranger and commenting on the weather. That's why most of the time (not all the time), when someone moves on to another job they lose contact with their old collegues. Because they were put together by chance, and while they made the best of being forced to spend the majority of their waking lives together, they missed out on the opportunity to develop real lasting connections with people.

> However, to work on making a reality where everybody’s jobs are taken by robots a tenable reality? No way sir, it is way too challenging for our small brains.

It's happening, so we had better figure out how to wrap our small brains around it.

This was a rhetorical question to highlight the ridiculousness of using this statement as justification for anything. You can state it however many times you want, it does not change reality.

Just as well, we would not need legs if only the reality was that we live in the water. Turns out, the reality is that we live on land and we need legs. The right way is to adapt humans to living in water first, and then legs would have been gone away through evolution. The wrong way is to cut off people’s legs[0].

> I'm guessing that you say that because you enjoy your job

Let’s stick to the point, not to what you imagine about me.

If somebody hates their job, taking away their source of income is extremely harmful (clearly they would have quit already if they didn’t absolutely need money). If somebody loves their job, taking away what gives their life meaning is extremely harmful.

> It's happening, so we had better figure out how to wrap our small brains around it.

Not at all. For it to start happening, those who are in charge of robot job replacement would have to stop plugging their ears and shouting whenever someone talks about the issues it causes.

I feel like we are talking past each other, I am done trying to rephrase my point.

[0] To make things obvious… Making sure jobs are not vital for human existence is evolving humans to live in water. Replacing jobs with robots is cutting off people’s legs.

What I'm saying is that the automation is happening, so we need to deal with that reality.

> stop plugging their ears and shouting whenever someone talks about the issues it causes

Exactly.

This is not a force of nature.

Perhaps what you mean to say is that certain people, heavily featured on this forum, are working on something that causes harm to many, which they are not concerned about because they get paid well, or at best because of some long-term utilitarian math—alongside those complicit in it by investing in the effort, trying to make it seem as if it’s “natural” and “inevitable” and “normal”, and so on.

If that’s what you mean—perhaps that’s true, and that’s exactly why this thread is happening.

It is man made, and unlike reality in which we’ve been living for thousands of years and which we are well adapted for this change is being forced by a wealthy minority onto the rest of humanity in the span of decades. Luckily it is far from being “reality” yet and it can well be stopped.

No that's not at all what I mean to say.

I see technological advancement as inevitible and good. A robot that can do jobs so that humans don't have to is a good thing. It's progress. People working towards progress aren't evil. I assume that they, like me, believe that our society can and should evolve with the technology. If it can't, that's our fault, not the fault of the tech. If our government is so embarrisingly bad that it exploits the people that it represents rather than helping them (which I agree it is), well that's also our fault and not the tech's. The government is us. We better get our shit together.

The wealthy already own and control everything. So your status quo goal of a fair society where we all work all day and feel needed and appreciated and have a nice comfortable life is already dead. You're defending a dead body.

It’s false, simply because it is a product of human effort and human choice to do this or the other.

> A robot that can do jobs so that humans don't have to is a good thing. It's progress

A “good thing” is what benefits humans. Robots replacing humans at what humans choose to do for their own benefit is decidedly not a good thing—aside from humans who profit from running the robots.

You may have noticed that I am repeating myself[0]. You are yet to show how this benefits humanity in a way that outweighs harm to humans who lose their jobs (especially considering many of them provided, without consent, the data instrumental for the robots to work in the first place). If you are among the people who work on robots, I think you ought to pause and reflect.

> The wealthy already own and control everything.

“They” don’t. A lot of “them” are here, by the way. Wealth gap is high, but to say it’s absolute (100% is owned by the rich and we are all just slaves for them) is simply wrong. We should work towards decreasing the gap, not increasing it.

[0] I am basically reiterating my original comment:

> “robots are coming for your jobs” is a valid argument against robots even if they can do those jobs better and faster, under two assumptions: 1) humans benefit from having jobs and 2) human benefit is the end goal.

I think it's pretty obvious if you think beyond trying to protect the status quo. The benefit is simply that machines do work so humans don't have to. It's no more complicated than that. It's what we humans have always strived to do: to make our lives easier. It's why an electric screwdriver exists.

The fact that making our lives easier has become a problem is the actual problem. We should address that problem instead of trying to protect it.

Why is it a benefit? Because not having to work the ultimate ideal? Why would that be the case?

To me it seems like it’s only an ideal for those who wield the robots who do the work and profit from that, not to people who wouldn’t be able to do compensated work if they wanted to. (Ultimately, it’s a means of control: if there are no jobs, the people in power get to decide how to distribute sustenance to jobless population. Rest assured, that population will not dare to bite the hand that feeds them.)

The ideal is to be able to choose to do work you enjoy doing, feel pride in it, get fairly compensated for it. To not be able to do this seems like a strongly negative outcome.

> making our lives easier has become a problem

Is “easier life” the ultimate ideal? Why? There’s many other, more compelling things it could be (e.g., “fulfilled”, “happy”, “meaningful”, “satisfying”) and many of them are not exactly aligned with “easy”.

Even if easier life was your ideal, the precedent has been that automation does not lead to that—we are doing more work (and more challenging, a.k.a. the opposite of “easy”, work) instead[0]. As jobs go away, whoever is still lucky to have one gets getting paid less to do more work (that’s just market forces at work), while a small minority profits and benefits from more accumulated power. Is that what you want to happen? If yes, we don’t have anything to discuss further. If not, you have the power to be part of the change.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45656916

I think I've been pretty consistent that I think the change necessary is a social/political one, not a tech one. Whether or not we're capable of this change is another question.

It is not even a question that it would be strongly unethical (like evil addictive social media/crypto scams/online casino times a thousand level of unethical) to proceed on working on job-replacing robots without considering what a tenable no-job reality would like like, or after deciding it is probably not achievable.

https://2020.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/

…we’ll add three hours to our day?

Bu seriously, I support what you are saying. This is why the entire consumer system needs to change, because in a world with no jobs it is by definition unsustainable.

What does the one have to do with the other?

But even then, currently plenty of people find their fun in creating - when it's not their job. And they struggle with finding the time for that. Sometimes the materials and training and machines for that also. Meanwhile a majority of current jobs involve zero personal creativity or making or creating. Driving or staffing a retail outlet or even most cooking jobs can't really be what you are looking for on your argument?

Is the road to post-scarcity more likely with or without robots?

E.g. if I was a truck driver and autonomous trucks came along that were 2/3rds the price and reduced truck related deaths by 99% obviously I couldn't, in good faith, argue that the rest of the population should pay more and have higher risk of death even to save my job and thousands of others. Though somehow this is a serious argument in many quarters (and accounts for lots of government spending).

Progress is great obviously, but progress as fast as possible with no care about the consequences is more motivated by money, not the common good.

Uh, have you seen the US lately? I think that ship has sailed.

They're busy selling watches whilst people can still afford them thanks to having jobs.

> Government no longer has the power or authority to constrain private enterprise; especially in highly technical sectors.

Perhaps you meant only this: "Government no longer has the power ..."? It is clear government still has the authority based on the will of the people.

But I'd argue the legal framework necessary to carry this out doesn't exist.

The strength of private lobbists, keeps power in the hands of private enterprise.

[x] Authoritarianism. [x] Civil rights abuses. [x] Blatant defiance of the law. [x] Unrepentant selfishness and lack of character. [x] Weaponization of the courts. [x] Loyalty tests at government agencies and in the military. [x] Political prosecutions. [x] Politicization of the Department of Justice. [x] Rampant presidential overreach. [x] The Supreme Court's endorsement and flimsy justification of presidential overreach. [x] Self-destructive trade policy. [x] Ineffective economic policy. [x] Erosion of norms. [x] Concerning presidential cognitive decline. [x] Institutional hollowing-out. [x] Defunding of science. [x] Destruction of USAID. [x] Blatant corruption. [x] Nepotism. [x] Use of the military for domestic purposes. [x] Firing of qualified military leaders. [x] Blatantly self-serving presidential pardons. [x] Firing of qualified civil servants. [x] Deliberately trying to traumatize civil servants. [x] Unnecessary tax breaks for the wealthy. [x] Intimidation of universities. [x] Rollback of environmental protections. [x] Unconstitutional and economically damaging immigration policies. [x] Top-down gerrymandering. [x] Firing of ~19 Inspectors General. [x] Unqualified cabinet members. [x] Relentless lying. [x] Implicit endorsement of conspiracy theories. [x] Public health policies that will lead to unnecessary deaths. [x] A president who 'models' immorality. [x] Tolerance of illegal and immoral behavior of political allies. [x] Prioritization of appearance over substance. [x] Opulent and disgusting displays of wealth. [x] Trampling on independent journalist access. [x] A foreign policy that undermines key alliances. [x] Dismantling of the Department of Education. [x] Undoing key healthcare provisions from the ACA. [x] Negligent inaction regarding AI catastrophic risks. [x] Motive and capability to manipulate voting machines [x] And more.

Positives? It looks like some durable peace deals are in the works.

Overall, things are dark.

* All the more reason to organize and act. No single person (or even group) can solve any of these problems alone. No person or group can afford to wait for other people to act.

We simply cannot afford to let our shock, anger, or fear get the better of us. We have to build coalitions to turn things around -- including coalitions with people that may vote in ways we don't like or believe things that we think don't make sense. We have to find coalitions that work. We have to persuade and build a movement that can outcompete and outlast Trumpism and whatever comes after it.

Private enterprise will always have some level of corrupting influence over government. And perhaps it sees current leadership as the lesser of two evils in the grand scheme. But make no mistake, government DOES ultimately have the power, when it chooses to assert itself and use it. It's just a matter of political will, which waxes and wanes.

Going back a century, did the British aristocracy WANT to be virtually taxed out of existence, and confined to the historical dustbin of "Downton Abbey"?

There's a theatrical push-pull negotiation narrative that's replayed to us, but do you honestly feel that government could push back strongly on _any issue_ it deemed necessary to?

Public enterprise is so firmly embedded in every corner of Government.

Everything in life involves compromise.

Authority requires the possibility of edict above compromise; which in my mind is no longer possible.

But it's not like "the government" (as if there is just one) simply doesn't want to fix things. There are many people who want to fix the way we distribute resources, but there are others who are working to stop them. The various millionaires behind these AI companies are part of the reason why the problem you identified exists in the first place.

So it's either "we all science ourselves out of a job and die from uncontrolled capitalism" or "we try to do something about the uncontrolled capitalism and in the meantime, everyone else keeps sciencing everyone out of a job". The result is the same, but some of us at least tried to do something about it.

That path is hard and risky (are AI countries eclipsing us in military power?), but probably more realistic than hoping for global cooperation.

This requires faith that the government will actually step in to do something, which many people lack (at least in the US, can't speak for globally).

That's the sticking point for many of the people I've talked to about it. Some are diametrically opposed to AI, but most think there's a realistic chance AI takes jobs away and an unrealistic chance the government opposes the whims of capital causing people displaced from their jobs to dip into poverty.

I can't say I have a good counter-argument either. At least in the US, the government has largely sided with capital for my entire life. I wouldn't take a bet that government does the kind of wealth redistribution required if AI really takes off, and I would eat my hat if it happens in a timely manner that doesn't require an absolute crisis of ruined lives before something happens.

See the accumulation of wealth at the top income brackets while the middle and lower classes get left behind.

TLDR this is more of a crisis of faith in the government than opposition to AI taking over crap jobs that people don't want anyways.

  > This is what government is for, and not to stifle innovation by banning AI but by preparing society to move forward.

Secondly, you assume in the first place that we can somehow build a stable post-scarcity society in which people with no leverage can control the super-intelligent agents with all of the power. The idea that "government will just fix it" is totally ignorant of what the government is or how it emerges. In the long run, you cannot have a ruling class that is removed from the keys to power.

Lastly, Who says we should all support this future? What if I disagree with the AI revolution and it's consequences?

It is kind of amazing how your path of reasoning is so dangerously misoriented and wrong. This is what happens when people grow up watching star trek, they just assume that once we live in a post scarcity future everything will be perfect, and that this is the natural endpoint for humanity.

They're not coming for all jobs. There are many jobs that exist today that could be replaced by automation but haven't been because people will pay a premium for it to be done by a human. There are a lot of artisan products out there which are technically inferior to manufactured goods but people still buy them. Separately, there are many jobs which are entirely about physical and social engagement with a flesh and blood human being, sex work being the most obvious, but live performances (how has Broadway survived in an era of mass adoption of film and television), and personal care work like home health aids, nannies, and doulas are all at least partially about providing an emotional connection on top of their actual physical labor.

And there's also a question of things that can literally only be done by human beings, because by definition they can only be done by human beings. I imagine in the future, many people will be paid full time to be part of scientific studies that can't easily be done today, such as extended, large cohort diet and exercise studies of people in metabolic chambers.

So we are all going to just do useless bullcrap like sell artisan clay pots to each other and pimp each other out? Wow, some future!

I just don't know how this goofball economy is going to work out when a handful elites/AI overlords control everything you need to eat and survive and everyone else is weaving them artisan wicker baskets and busking (jobs which are totally automated and redundant, have you, but the elites would keep us around for the sentimental value).

>I imagine in the future, many people will be paid full time to be part of scientific studies that can't easily be done today, such as extended, large cohort diet and exercise studies of people in metabolic chambers.

Yeah this is one plausible future, we could all be lab rats testing the next cancer medicine or donating organs to the elites. I can't imagine the conditions will be very humane, being that the unwashed masses will have basically no leverage to negotiate their pay.

And capitalism has flourished during this time. There's no reason to believe even more automation is going to change that, on its own.

Sure, Musk and Altman can make noises and talk about the need for UBI "in the future" all they want, but their political actions clearly show which side they're actually on.

Well, it would start by not tax-favoring the (capital) income that remains and would have to have grown massively relatively to the overall economy for that to have occurred.

(In fact, it could start by doing that now, and the resulting tax burden shift would reduce the artificial tax incentive to shift from labor intensive to capital intensive production methods, which would, among other things, buy more time to deal with the broader transition if it is actually going to happen.)

if robots are that advanced that can do most of the jobs - the cost of goods will be close to zero.

government will product and distribute most of the things above and you mostly won't need any money, but if you want extra to travel etc there will always be a bunch of work to do - and not 8 hours per day

No, the cost of goods will be the cost of the robots involved in production amortized over their production lifetime. Which, if robots are more productive than humans, will not be “near zero” from the point of view of any human without ownership of at least the number of robots needed to produce the goods that they wish to consume (whether that’s private ownership or their share of socially-owned robots). If there is essentially no demand for human labor, it will, instead, be near infinite from their perspective .

This assumes, among other things that are unlikely to be true, that the only cost of extraction is (robot) labor, and that mining rights are free, rather than being driven by non-zero demand and finite supply.

(Another critical implicit assumption is that energy is free rather than being driven by non-zero demand and finite supply, as failing that will result in a non-zero price for robot labor even if the materials in the robot were free.)

>government will product and distribute most of the things above and you mostly won't need any money

So basicially what you are saying is that a government monopoly will control everything?

>> government monopoly

there is no monopoly if there is no market

This is not going to happen.

We all know a post-apocalyptic world is what awaits us.

More or less Elysium is the future if ppl will still behave the same way they do now.

And I doubt ppl will change in a span of 100 years.

1. We don’t need everyone in society to be involved in trade.

2. We made it so that if you do not take part in trade (trade labor for income), you cannot live.

3. Thus, people will fear losing their ability to trade in society.

The question is, when did we make this shift? It used to just be slavery, and you would be able to survive so long as you slaved.

The fear is coming from something odd, the reality that you won’t have to trade anymore to live. Our society has convinced us you won’t have any value otherwise.

We did not make it so, this has been the natural state for as long as humans have existed, and in fact, it’s been this way for every other life form on Earth.

Maybe with post-scarcity (if it ever happens) there could be other ways of living. We can dream. But let’s not pretend that “life requires effort” is some sort of temporary unnatural abomination made by capitalists. It’s really just a fact.

Paradigm shift means, “I can live without being involved in a financial contract with another entity”. This is the milestone before us.

My point is that until now, we have never been able to find a functioning system that frees us from work (trade is just one type of work, so is hunting for survival, or photosynthesis), and until something changes dramatically (like a machine that caters to our every need), I find it hard to believe this can change.

One of the ways this shift will have momentum is that children today are going to be born into the light. They will live decades without the concept of having to make decisions around the scarcity of work and resources. They will not have the same values and viewpoints on society that, we, legacy components of the system, are currently engulfed by.

Our generation will be the last to join all other prior generations, in the boat of economic slavery, and it will be allowed to drift and sail away from port for the final time. It was a long journey, generations and generation were involved. Lots of thieving and abuse, good riddance.

It's called capitalism

Personal belief, but AI coming for your children is not a valid argument against AI. If AI can do a job better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the parenting. Specialization is how we got to the future. So the problem isn't AI, it's the structure of how we humans rely on parenting for their children. I don't necessarily feel like it's the AI company's problem to fix either. This is what government is for, and not to stifle innovation by banning AI but by preparing society to move forward.

…

You’re right about one thing within reason… this is what a rationale government should be for… if the government was by the people and for the people.

Addendum for emphasis: …and if that government followed the very laws it portends to protect and enforce…

Procreation and progeny is our only true purpose — and one could make the argument AI would make better parents and teachers. Should we all capitulate our sole purpose in the name of efficiency?

We use tools all the time.

So that would mean it is in fact the responsibility of the people at robot/AI companies (and across industries). It's not something we can just delegate to role-based authorities to sort out on our behalf.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

The workforce gives regular folks at least some marginal stake in civilization. Governments aren’t effective engines against AI. We failed to elect Andrew Yang in 2020–who was literally running on a platform of setting up a UBI tax on AI. Congress is completely corrupt and ineffectual. Trump gutting the government.

You may be right about ai taking jobs eventually if that’s what you’re saying, but you come off pretty coldly if you’re implying it’s what “should” happen because it’s Darwinian and inevitable, and just sorta “well fuck poor people.”

The AI will belong to the parasite class who will capture all the profits - but you can't tax them on this, because they can afford to buy the government. So there isn't really a way to fund food and shelter for the population without taking something from the billionaires. Their plans for the future does not include us [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...

Why are people even doing the jobs?

In a huge number of cases people have jobs that largely amount to nothing other than accumulation of wealth for people higher up.

I have a feeling that automation replacement will make this fact all the more apparent.

When people realise big truths, revolutions occur.

What if the issue isn't government failing to prepare society to move forward, but instead, AI businesses moving us in a direction that more and more people don't consider to be forward?

Not the AI company’s fault per se, but generally the US government does a very poor job of creating a safety net either intentionally, ineptitude or indifference.

By the way, attacks were also leveled against Chinese and Japanese California workers who were viewed as stealing the jobs of other “Americans”. So this viewpoint and tradition of behavior and capitalism is very long in US history.

We should compare how anti-government politicians talk versus how trained, educated neoclassical economists talk. The latter readily recognize that a valid function of government is to steer, shape, and yes, regulate markets to some degree. This is why we don’t have (for example) legal, open markets for murder.

Markets do not define human values; they are a coordination mechanism given a diverse set of values.

And even if the government did institute something like universal basic income, if all jobs were replaced, that would almost certainly mean a lower standard of living for the middle class, and even less socioeconomic mobility than there is now.

Taking work away from people is practically the definition of technology. We invent things to reduce the effort needed to do things. Eliminating work is a good thing, that’s why inventing things is so popular!

What ends up happening is the amount of work remains relatively constant, meaning we get more done for the same amount of effort performed by the same amount of people doing the same amount of jobs. That’s why standards of living have been rising for the past few millennia instead of everybody being out of work. We took work away from humans with technology, we then used that effort saved to get more done.

That's a pretty hard bet against AGI becoming general. If the promises of many technologists come to pass, humans remaining in charge of any work (including which work should be done) would be a waste of resources.

Hopefully the AGI will remember to leave food in the cat bowls.

Anger at companies who hold power in multiple places to prevent and worsen this situation for people is valid anger.

Does anyone have any idea of the new jobs that will be created to replace the ones that are being lost? If it's not possible to at least foresee it, then it's not likely to happen. In which case the job loss will be long-term not short-term.

This is not a zero sum game. For an economy to exist we need consumers. For consumers to exist we need people to have jobs and be paid. So the equilibrium is that there will be some new jobs somewhere, not done by robots, that will pay people enough to consume the (better and cheaper) goods made by those robots. Or we'll just have a lot of leisure time and get paid by the government. Or (like some other discussion thread) we'll all be wiped out or slaves in the salt mines if the elites can just sustain/improve without us and are able to enforce it. Either way, it's not the scenario where we're out of jobs sitting at home.

I think that's really unimaginative and not thinking about it right. If you control the basic resources and own the tools needed to convert those into whatever you want, why does the "economy" even matter? If you can get anything you want without needing anything from the other 95% of people, having "consumers" in the sense you're thinking doesn't matter any more.

There is zero indication that there will be new jobs, new work. Just because there was lots of low hanging fruit historically does not mean we will stumble into some new job creators now. Waiving away concerns with 'jobs always have magically appeared when needed' is nonsense and a non-response to their concerns.

If everything that a human can do, a robot can do better and cheaper, then humans are completely shut out of the production function. Humans have a minimum level of consumption that they need to stay alive whether or not they earn a wage; robots do not.

Since most humans live off wages which they get from work, they are then shut out of life. The only humans left alive are those who fund their consumption from capital rents.

See: "build me a bigger yacht", building moon bases, researching immortality medicine, and building higher walls and better killbots to manage any peasant attacks

The entire promise of AI is to negate that statement. So if AI is truly successful, then that will no longer be true.

Replace the word robot with "automation" or "industrialization" and you have the last 200 years of human history covered.

The Ludites could have won and we would all have 1500$ shirts.

Do you know any lamp lighters? How about a town crier?

We could still all be farming.

Where are all the switch board operators? Where are all the draftsmen?

How many people had programing jobs in 1900? 1950?

We have an amazing ability to "make work for ourselves", and history indicates that we're going to keep doing that regardless of how automated we make society. We also keep traditional "arts" alive... Recording didnt replace live performances, TV/Film didnt replace Broadway... Photography didnt replace painting...

None of this holds if you don't have anything of value to offer and automation is concentrating power and value, AI is the extreme end of this - at some point the charade of democracy becomes too annoying to the ones at the top, and you get there faster by trying to reign them in.

Ngl, if someone nuked all USA's servers and wipes out the all these bullshit i'm not convinced the world would be in a worst state right now.

Let AI be used by scientific research, development, helping people out. But if it's just to sit your smelly ideas down, you may even be right, but ultimately the form, intentions and result matter more than recklessly endangering everybody.

TBH I feel like the AI discourse around human replacement smell like hard-core psychopathic behavior - or the one of a drunken dude who's driving a car just happy.

You have 0 data concerning the result it would do on society - and I definitely prefer to live in a less technological world than a world that is full of people with psychosis.

So until we find how we can solve this bottleneck I have 0 sympathy for this kind of discourse.

-- Frank Herbert, Dune

The "government" is just the set of people who hold power over others.

Those who will own machines that can match humans will have unprecedented power over others. In effect they'll grow more and more to be the government.

Even now, companies hold more and more of the power over others and are more part of the government than ever before.

So it confuses me when you say it's what the government is for? Who would that be? If we pretend it would still be a democracy then I guess you're saying it's everyone's problem?

So here we are, let's discuss the solution and vote for it?

Often, yes, but in a more functional society it would be the mechanism we collectively use to prevent a few people from amassing excessive wealth and power.

America isnt really a democracy it's a plutocracy.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/swiss-lgbtq-groups-...

"Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

That's not a paradox of tolerance, it is the anti-democratic practice of fascism.

> they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.

This is exactly my point: an emerging fascist government through authoritarian or oppressive practices destroys tolerance by silencing people for any words that go against their agenda. There is no paradox here.

(What do you refer to with "this"?)

we do actually have real democracy in this state, where we have binding referendums, but legislature is able to act faster than we're allowed to, to work around and nullify the policy we vote for. -so voting is fine; nothing wrong with it; but I guess I just worry, oftentimes, people get too involved in it and attached to movements which can accomplish something one day only for it to be reversed by the end of the decade. feels like the two sides are getting angrier and angrier, spinning their wheels in dysfunctional politics, and we can't have a functional government in this environment; one side guts government to replace with loyalists, then the other guts it again in a few years to replace the partisans, to replace with their own partisans. meanwhile, national debt just keeps climbing as people swarm into gold.

my compost piles, though -- not directly, but I can eat that; I can feed people with that. you know, you want to solve hunger -- you can contribute directly to food pantries. it's more work than voting, but something actually happens. -and almost all the regulation government cares about relates to capitalism; they don't care about my carrots because my carrots don't engage in capitalism. -and for some people in some circumstances, it doesn't take too much engagement with capitalism to be able to get $100k or whatever you need for a plot of land with electricity in a rural area if you plan out for it.

Herbert, as an aside, expressed a kind of appreciation for Nixon. His son wrote in a foreword to some edition of a Dune book I read mentioning this. He was glad the corruption was exposed and so blatant, because now, surely, voters would see how bad things became and will not let it happen again. Optimistic guy.

The government should keep its charge as the protector and upholder of justice, I don’t want it to be those things and then also become a fiat source for economic survival, that’s a terribly destructive combination because the government doesn’t care for competition or viability, and survival is the last place you want to have all your eggs in one basket, especially when the eggs are guaranteed by force of law and the basket becomes a magnet for corruption.

Rent extraction hurts them in the long run. Because working class income gets absorbed by various forms of rent, they are more expensive to employ. Thus we fail to compete with, say, China, which socializes many costs and invests in productive industry. We are left with a top heavy society that as we can see is already starting to crumble.

Best summarized in this comic: https://x.com/9mmballpoint/status/1658163045502267428

That's noble. The first is dystopian

If you are going to use my work without permission to build such a robot, then said robot shouldn’t exist.

On the other hand a jack of all trades robot is very different from all the advancements we have had so far. If the robot can do anything, in the best case scenario we have billions of people with lots of free time. And that doesn’t seem like a great thing to me. Doubt that’s ever gonna happen, but still.

The problem as I see it is not robots coming for my job and taking away my ability to earn a salary. That can be solved by societal structures like you are saying, even though I am somewhat pessimistic of our ability to do so in our current political climate.

The problem I see is robots coming for my mind and taking away any stakes and my ability to do anything that matters. If the robot is an expert in all fields why would you bother to learn anything? The fact that it takes time and energy to learn new skills and knowledge is what makes the world interesting. And this is exactly what happened before when machines took over a lot of human labour, luckily there were still plenty of things they couldn't do and thus ways to keep the world interesting. But if the machines start to think for us, what then is left for us to do?

Robots have been better at chess than humans for a quarter of a century. Yet, chess is still a delightful intellectual and social persuit.

Anyway there is a name for your kind of take. It is anti-humanist.

In my home country, the people building the robots and job destroying AI have captured all three branches of government, and have been saying for over 40 years that they'd like to shrink government down to a size that they could drown it in a bathtub. The government can't be relied upon to do more than move its military into our cities to violently stifle dissent.

We as a society get to decide what is done in our society. If robots replace a few jobs but make goods cheaper for everyone that's a net positive for society.

If robots replace EVERYONE's job, where everyone has no income anymore that's clearly a huge negative for society and it should be prevented.

Humans have depended on their own labor for income since we stopped being hunters and gatherers or living in small tribes.

So it's not just a matter of "the gov will find a way", but it's basically destroying the way humanity as a whole has operated for the past 5000 years.

So yes, it's a huge problem. Everything done under the banner of "innovation" isn't necessarily a good thing. Slavery was pretty "innovative" as well, for those who were the slave owners.

So while you’ve identified the real problem we need to identify a realistic solution.

The over-application of objective phrases like "valid" vs "invalid" when talking about non-formal arguments is a sickness a lot of technical people tend to share. In this case, it's dismissive of harm to humans, which is the worst thing you can be dismissive about. "Please don't make me and my family miserable" is not an "invalid argument" - that's inhuman. That person isn't arguing their thesis.

"The problem". Another common oversimplifying phrase used by us thinkers, who believe there is "the answer", as if either of those two things exist as physical objects. "The problem" is that humans are harmed. Everything else just exists within that problem domain, not as "part of the problem" or "not part of the problem".

But most importantly:

Yes, you're absolutely correct (and I hate to use this word, but I'm angry): Obviously the ideal state is that robots do all the work we don't want to do and we do whatever we want and our society is structured in a way to support that. You've omitted the part where that level of social support is very hard to make physically feasible, very hard to convince people of depending on their politics, and, most importantly: It's usually only enough to spare people from death and homelessness, not from misery and unrest. Of course it would be ridiculous to outright ban for-profit use of automation, but even more ridiculous to write a bill that enforces it, e.g. by banning any form of regulation.

Short and medium term, automating technologies are good for the profit of businesses and bad for the affected humans. Long term, automating technologies are good for everybody, but only if society actually organizes that transition in a way that doesn't make those affected miserable/angry. It isn't, and I don't think it's pessimistic to say that it probably won't.

I'd love to live in Star Trek! We don't. We won't for hundreds of years if ever. Technology isn't the limiting factor, the immutable nature of human society and resources are the limiting factors. Nothing else is interesting to even talk about until we clear the bar of simply giving a shit about what actually, in concrete reality, happens to our countrymen.