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Re:What should we tell our students? by appplication on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:32PM (#50015672)
The challenge is not will robots fix toilets but will the economics support it if we end up with most of the world unemployed and without careers. Yes of course we can hand wave basic income and government intervention but reading the room (e.g. last 70+ years of US labor and capital trends) it’s not the most likely outcome, even if it is the most game theory optimal for all.

Realistically the outcome of highly capable advanced AI is an economic dark age more than anything else.

Re:What should we tell our students? by UncleOxidant on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:40PM (#50015718)
I read The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler a couple years back. In it AIs were running ocean fishing fleets. They figured out that robots were too expensive and prone to malfunction at sea, so they would have the robots kidnap people on shore, drug them and then have them wake up on the ships too far out in the ocean to be able to escape and thenm tell them they could get back home if they work.
Re:What should we tell our students? by CGamesPlay on Friday October 09, 2026 @12:15AM (#50015931)
Humans were doing a hundred years ago in reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing
Re:What should we tell our students? by ptidhomme on Friday October 09, 2026 @02:31AM (#50016780)
The AI overlords will eventually consider the majority of human lives to be worthless. Let's face it, one day we will need to fight for mere survival.
Re:What should we tell our students? by hnfong on Friday October 09, 2026 @03:55AM (#50017438)
It's hilarious to read stuff like this.

Robots automating everything and humans not needing to work was the stuff paradise fantasies were made of.

Sure, it would be the end of capitalism (which, I guess you could describe as "economic dark age"), but people these days have so little imagination what life outside of capitalism looks like that ideal societies sound like a horror story.

Re:What should we tell our students? by gunslinger_meta on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:31AM (#50017670)
Yeah it surely is lack of imagination - not the fact that humans have evolved hundreds of thousands of years to survive in resource constrained environments.
Re:What should we tell our students? by pfdietz on Friday October 09, 2026 @08:39AM (#50019639)
I know, right?

Communism was a horror for multiple reasons, but two big ones were: the planners didn't have the data or ability to actually plan (the interactions in a market economy did that much better), and not doing the work you were assigned was a crime (that is, slavery).

AGI and AGLabor solves both these problems. If you don't need workers, you don't need to coerce them into work. And planning and massive data collection (and management in general) sounds like something AGI would work very well at. The conceit that the lower classes are disempowered before the capitalists never struck me as well founded.

Re:What should we tell our students? by marmarama on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:16PM (#50023667)
It's ironic you talk about communism, because fundamentally this is a problem of "owning the means of production", i.e. who controls the AI and the robots.

If it's you and me, then hey, we can all live happily ever after pursuing hobbies and art, provided for by our mechanical friends, within the limits of resource availability.

If it's an AI trillionaire, things aren't so rosy. If they don't need workers, why would they even bother allocating outputs from the robots to keep us alive?

I don't doubt at all that some group or another will enjoy the fruits of artificial labour. The question is how we are going to get there, and whether that group is most people who are live today and their descendants, or just the families and friends of trillionaires.

Re:What should we tell our students? by quadragenarian on Friday October 09, 2026 @11:08PM (#50029156)
My hope is that all wealth becomes concentrated in the hand of one person, thereby becoming worthless.

I guess one could make the argument that with enough control, a trillionaire could amass a private robot army. But I think regular humans still win (after an epic battle of course).

Re:What should we tell our students? by kolinko on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:42AM (#50017772)
We will always have jobs that require humans, they just don’t pay enough right now. Teachers, therapists, childcare, doctors, and whatnot.

And jobs that require humans’ responsibility.

People can do people stuff, machines can do machine stuff. And market will react accordingly.