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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?
This just isn't true. Big companies are sacking people because of AI. Chegg, Salesforce, IBM, BT Group, Morgan Stanley... More are freezing hiring for juniors. Why are so many artists complaining about AI if it's not costing them anything?
Modern warfare runs on software. The logistics chains, communications, intelligence-gathering and analysis, sensors communicating with eachother to guide missiles over 1000s of kilometres, electronic warfare... all of it relies on an extremely complex base of computer code that nobody really understands that well.
AI improves that. If your drones can't be jammed because they're autonomous and can find targets on their own, that's a critical military advantage. If your radar software gets optimized by some black-box AI to counter whatever arcane modification the enemy made to their jamming software, that's a major military advantage. Optimization of complex systems in unintuitive domains is a strongsuit of AI. See AI-designed computer chips, Google has been doing that for a while. Modern AI systems are also useful for controlling high energy plasma in fusion reactor chambers, predicting the weather (obvious military and economic significance) and countless other complex domains. Cyberwarfare is another obvious domain where AI is relevant: spear-phishing, reconnaissance, actual infiltrations...
If you can quickly process huge amounts of satellite, infrared, aerial, sensor data to provide firing coordinates to your forces, that's a major military advantage. Not to mention fast translation of signals intelligence... There just aren't enough analysts to cope with all the data that militaries can scrape up.
Facebook is making billions and billions from its AI-optimized advertising, as are other big tech companies. Consumer-end text and images are just the tip of the iceberg.
It's not just 'producing crap text'. The text is valuable and useful. Domain-specific programs are valuable and useful. General text-generation (which is capable of doing advanced cyber tasks like writing kernels or performing cyberattacks) is valuable and useful. I can tell it's valuable and useful because people are paying billions for it!
Nvidia products are killing people at the front in Ukraine right now. Hell, an AI found me these links.
https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2025/06/ukrainian-intelligence-details-russias-new-v2u-autonomous-loitering-munition.php
https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/russian-lancet-3-kamikaze-drone-filled-with-foreign-parts
In conclusion, it's obvious and straightforward that AI is hugely important. That's why the great powers are racing to develop it, why the US is anxious about China getting AI chips, why the megacorps are investing hundreds of billions in it. The worldview of the AI-believer is simple and makes sense 'powerful technology - big investment - widespread use' whereas the AI-doubter is mired in weirdness 'mostly useless technology - big tech just throwing money down the drain for some inexplicable reason - no widespread use once you ignore most of the use'.
Let me ask a practical question. That's a lot of if statements you made there.
Has AI actually done any of those things? The specific examples you give of things that already exist are mostly speculative - all I can find about AI-designed computer chips, for instance, are hype stories in pop science magazines, rather than anything credible, and even they include the note that most of the AI designs did not work.
In general I am skeptical of the argument that goes, "I can tell it's valuable and useful because people are paying billions for it!" In a sense that proves that it's 'valuable', insofar as you can define value in terms of what people are willing to pay for, but none of that proves that it's useful. People are willing to pay vast amounts of money for obviously worthless things on a regular basis - NFTs are one infamous example.
I can concede a handful of highly technical niche applications - protein folding, plasma confinement, etc. - though even there I'm a little cautious. (I don't understand those technical fields, but in fields that I do understand, where AI is being hailed as a major breakthrough, the breakthroughs once analysed turn out to be, at best, heavily overrated.) But the AI-believer position, in cases like this, are that AI is literally going to make labour obsolete, or that AI is going to become superintelligent, achieve god-like power, and either usher us all to utopia or to utter destruction. And that's a position that is so far in excess of any reasonable estimation of what this technology does that I have to raise my eyebrows. Or yell at a blog post on the internet, I suppose.
The Nvidia AI chips in Russian missiles, performing autonomous targeting to bypass jamming, per my links.
Also, per the chip article, some do work and that's the key part? It's easier to simulate a chip design and check if it works than to design a chip with superior performance.
I think the trend is pretty clear. Right now AI is causing some unemployment, producing some economic gains (mostly concentrated in big tech), adding some military gains. I expect this trend to continue and accelerate as the tech gets better and adoption improves.
Where is the evidence that incorporating AI into a workplace increases workload, rather than decreases it? Reminds me of the Yes Minister quote about thousands of new staff being hired to deal with the chaos caused by the labour-saving computers... but we don't seem to see increases in employment amongst AI adopters.
NFTs aren't useful but people certainly did value them, it's just a novel subgenre of art/signalling good. I personally don't want to buy a bored ape or ugly abstract paintings, a CS GO knife skin or an extremely expensive watch that's functionally inferior to my Casio but I accept they have some kind of value. Anyway, people aren't buying AI because it's classy to have (indeed, its gotten pretty low-status), they buy it because of its utility, convenience, cost-efficiency.
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