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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.
It’s like when the Nazis designated certain sections of their population to be “useless eaters” and then gave them a lifetime stipend out of the government’s pocket so they could continue uselessly eating. Or when corporations run the numbers and decide that ten percent of their employees aren’t making the company enough money so they decide to keep paying them anyway. Or when Pol Pot decided Cambodia didn’t need scientists or intellectuals so he gave them all a monthly check to stay out of everybody else’s way. Or how during periods of food insecurity, Inuit tribes would give the most elderly and infirm members double portions of seal meat to make sure they don’t lose too much weight.
The civil wars will continue until the maximum wage returns to zero.
The problem with "well, it'd finally be a communist society" is that communist societies only work if the proletariat has a [distributed] monopoly on violence (and often they don't, or they lose it, which is why real communism has never been tried). From 1750 to 1900 (and even today, to a point), this was the hand-held firearm, but as soon as that decisively changes you can expect industrial-scale 20th-century style mass murder campaigns to make its triumphant return.
Of course, drones may just as easily not form another shot heard 'round the world, but killbots require highly advanced manufacturing and materials which are extremely capital-intensive. Which is why the average citizen, and in particular the average man, has seen his socio-economic standard of living decline over the last 50 years (hence why he is beholden to endless bureaucracy, the heckler's veto, environmentalism, etc. that didn't exist back when he was needed).
Can anything fix that? Well, maybe you can ask the AI how to build your own personal nuclear deterrent in a cave with a box of scraps (in which case things get very interesting; there may be a time period where haplocide is available at one's fingertips if the technology develops in certain ways)- again, it's not a sure thing that everyone just starts killing each other... just a likelihood.
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