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I'm thinking about the culture war around AI, specifically the whole UBI debate. If AI truly does take over a lot of human work, there's a lot of people who are savagely agitating for a UBI on one side, saying we'll be post work. The other side of course says no that's not how it works, besides we aren't even close to being able to afford that. The left (generally) takes the former, while the right generally takes the latter.
What I'm surprised by is why nobody has so far mentioned what, to me, seems the obvious compromise - we just shorten the work week! As our forefathers did forcing a 5 day, 8 hour work week, why don't we continue there? Go down to a 4 day work week, and/or shorten standard working hours to 6 per day?
If AI truly will obviate the need for a lot of work, how is this not the more rational solution than trying to magically create a UBI out of money we don't have? How come this idea has barely even entered the discourse? I have been talking and thinking about AI unemployment for years and never once have heard someone argue for this compromise.
To be honest the existence and shape of much of this discourse continues to baffle me. There's a discourse around AI causing unemployment, even though AI thus far has not caused any unemployment, and there isn't an obvious mechanism for it doing so. Isn't the evidence so far that incorporating AI into a workplace increases workload, rather than decreases it? It's always possible that this changes, but I'd at least like to see the argument that it will, rather than it just being assumed.
The pattern seems to play out time and time again - Scott's last post about China made me want to scream something. Where is the reason to think that AI is so militarily and economically significant at all? What if this is all nonsense? Isn't this all based on a vision of AI technology that has no justification in reality?
Maybe there's an AI 101 argument out there somewhere that everybody else has read and which passed me by entirely, but right now I continue to be incredibly confused by this discourse. We made systems that can generate text and images, but which are consistently pretty crap at both. Given time I can imagine them becoming somewhat less crap, but where do they pivot or transform into the sorts of devices that could cause massive technological unemployment, or change a war between great powers?
AI and techno-futurism in general are the dominant religion of our times. They aren't seen as a religion because the worshipers ignore metaphysics and fundamental axioms. So yes, it's based on a religious vision a lot of the time.
Metaphysics and fundamental axioms preclude human level AI? Can you elaborate?
Depends on what you mean by 'human level AI'. I believe they preclude machine consciousness, but I don't know it well enough to explain it. I'd recommend the book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss if you want an intro to classical theistic metaphysics.
By "human level" I mean an AI that can perform tasks at the same quality as a human, such that you could replace a human employee with an AI employee.
I actually think consciousness might not be required for this level of AI. It's like how chess AIs are superhuman at chess without being conscious (probably).
I'm also not a theist. Any arguments about AI that really on theism are not going to be convincing to me.
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