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Prediction: We are heading for an AI-middle ground boom.
Predictions regarding AI tend to cluster in two extremes, those who believe we are on a parabolic arc towards super-intelligence and those who believe AI just produces slop. The pessimism regarding AI clusters around to conflicting narratives, it is so good it will cause mass unemployment and AI is so useless that the AI bubble will pop. My take is that AI is mid and that is a good thing. Gemini 3 and Claude 4.5 are useful. However, since LLMs are limited by context windows, social skills, an inability to learn after training and don't have human judgment they can't replace us. Both doomer narratives are false, we aren't going to replace all the software developers with claude, and claude is not so useless that users will abandon it, causing the AI bubble to pop.
The AI speedup is more than worker speed being improved by LLMs. Many projects are stalled waiting for someone else to complete a task. A typical corporate scenario is that someone works an hour on something, emails it to someone who waits a week before working an hour on it, and then sends it off to the next person. With LLMs enormous speed ups can be achieved by not having to wait for answers.
AI is much more than large language models. It has long been used in areas like weather prediction, and over the past decade its capabilities have advanced dramatically. Twelve years ago, AI systems struggled with basic image recognition tasks such as distinguishing cats from dogs; today, they can reliably detect subtle anomalies on factory floors. AI is now widely applied in biotech, scientific research, mining, oil extraction, fraud detection, and many other fields.
What once required a machine-learning PhD can often be accomplished in a matter of days by a technically competent practitioner using cloud platforms such as Google Cloud. While humanoid robots have captured public attention and robot butlers remain unrealistic, AI is already accelerating the deployment of industrial robots and other forms of automation. Advanced driver-assistance systems are reducing the risk of traffic accidents, and AI is speeding up academic work and scientific discovery. More broadly, AI excels at uncovering patterns in massive datasets and surfacing insights and information that would otherwise remain hidden.
Scientific work is iterative. Progress is built upon earlier progress, and one bottleneck in a chain of discoveries prevents the subsequent discoveries from happening.
If AI can unlock a few bottlenecks, that could unlock subsequent discoveries that depend upon them. We could see a small jump in scientific discoveries.
Predictions for the culture war:
We are not going to see mass unemployment, even if a few sectors end up being impacted. Smaller organizations are more nimble and able to react to changes while having similar access to AI as large corporations, this benefits small players. AI deflationary as the cost of production go down. AI in ecommerce is making the field even more cut throat driving prices down. Low inflation will cause low interest rates and high asset price inflation. The economy is going to have wind in its back over the next decade as productivity rises. Government is going to be worse at utilizing AI than the private sector leading to an increasing view of the government as incompetent and falling behind.
Usually, the one guy on the team not using an LLM.
I swear, people who are not me have to have been using entirely different LLMs than I have. Every time I've used them for anything beyond the super trivial, I get results that are missing major components, or don't solve the business requirements, or contradict themselves. Like, I just opened up cursor and asked it for the CSS to render rounded corners in outlook, and it got it entirely wrong (it produced non-rounded objects because it used border-radius, which anyone who has coded anything for outlook knows doesn't work). When I told it that, it produced different code that (and I can't stress this enough) still fucking used border-radius.
Seriously, at this point I'm more likely to say that the person using the LLM is going to stall the project; they're going to produce verbose but contradictory requirements, they'll produce code that is written fast, but doesn't actually work, or they'll use it to answer emails in such a way that it doesn't actually answer the question that is stalling the damn project.
All I can say is that my company pays for the service. I'm a weird use-case because I use it a lot for code context, light scripting and other ops/dev/ops tasks. I"m not a dev. Anyway, I asked Claude-Code to describe itself:
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It also really depends how you use them - a lot of people open a chat and then ten messages and a bunch of code lookups later they ask for something, then they don't like it so they ask for a correction, the correction is bad and they complain and ask for another correction, etc. So you have 30,000 tokens or more, containing a bunch of broken code that you don't want. Some people use the same chats for days or weeks.
Important points:
But yeah, sometimes the LLM just derps.
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I think somebody here said a while ago that the paid LLMs are leagues more competent than the free ones, so if you're using a free one you may not be getting the full picture.
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Or a regulatory hurdle which doesn't necessarily allow for just AI-ing it if there's a necessity of a human signoff for compliance.
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If we manage to achieve this path, I might consider it evidence that God (or the simulation masters) exist and loves humans.
Since this is the exact path we'd need to tread to avoid massive fallout from our demographic crisis while also avoiding entirely the existential risk issue.
I think the question that does need addressing even in this case is sincerely what to do about those who are dumber than AI on average, but can still perhaps do meaningful work under AI supervision or instruction. I don't want to relegate any humans to 'sheep' status, even if they are sort of happy under that paradigm.
Me, I kind of want to have a world where there's 'expert systems' almost everywhere, AIs that are specialized in various tasks (self driving cars being one example) and humans thus are still doing plenty of high-level decisionmaking, maybe consulting the big AI oracles when they do so.
But it does seem inevitable that people are going to be all too happy to offload any and all 'hard' decisions to AI and gleefully follow recommendation its makes even if its not superintelligent enough to optimize everyone's lives everywhere for maximum wellbeing.
So there is still a nightmarish scenario where the upkeep of our society is now 100x more complex thanks to all the work required to keep the AIs running, we can't really focus as much as we'd like on just things that make us happy since we're constantly being directed around to do all the tiddly little maintenance tasks, and if we get a disaster that breaks the AIs or similar breakdown, things will regress so fast all at once that we won't be able to prevent a full collapse.
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Seconding @100ProofToolBooth that this post has many characteristics of AI writing, and looks to me significantly different from your usual writing style.
As we've said, it's not against the rules to use AI to help you write (because we could be wrong, and can never prove it) but come on, people. Most of us would rather read your own error-ridden shady thoughts, typos and all, than your rough draft sanded off by an LLM.
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I agree with the general thrust of this that we won't get post-scarcity paradise or dystopian hellscape, AI will be a technology eventually folded in (what works of it) into the economy and maybe government policies in some areas, and most of us will go on as we have been doing.
Jobs that can be automated will be (the robot factories run by AI rather than human overseers) and some white-collar work will get disrupted along with that, which will be interesting to watch, but we'll end up pretty much as we are now.
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"Written by AI" alarm bells going off. The paragraph structure and word choice here is telling:
Specifically I'm calling "first full paragraph was written by OP, rest was written by LLM told to continue the thought"
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Strong agree that AI will not cause mass unemployment. If the industrial revolution didn't create widespread unemployment while pushing 80%+ of the population from agriculture to manufacturing/services, then it's safe to assume basically nothing ever will stop a society from having to do work of some sort, even if it's just silly stuff like zero-sum status games.
Also agree that AI will be "mid" relative to the FOOM doomer and singularity expectations that some have. I'm a bit more bearish on the productivity gains than you are. There will certainly be gains to some extent, but a lot of society's blockers are socially-enforced like housing restrictions, lawyerly reviews, etc. that are political problems that AI won't be able to solve by itself.
It created ample unemployment among industries where the machines were just flat out better than a human could be.
The whole premise with AGI is that it can in theory be better at everything that a human could do.
Yes, but those people then just found different jobs, and society became more efficient overall. Losing your job temporarily sucks but creative destruction is part of living in a vibrant society.
AGI will never be better than humans at simply being human, which will count for a lot to some people and to some fields.
The popularity of Replika et al makes me worry your final claim is less secure than you might think.
AI will do some things that humans used to have a monopoly on, like companionship, but other sectors will remain the realm of humans for decades. Stuff like human doctors, even if AI is proven to be better in every possible way, will still be wanted since "that's how we've always done it". It will take many years to work through stuff like that.
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Yeah, the idea that productivity will zoom up only applies to certain work. How fast can you now build a house if it's all AI? Can AI make it possible for houses to be completed from greenfield site to turn-key in a week? I think there will be gains, but the idea that AI is a magic wand is dreaming.
Funnily enough, it seems like the task that makes house construction take the longest is getting permits to build, and filling out or approving applications seems like something LLMs might actually be able to make faster.
Oh, don't worry about that: the paperwork will expand to fill the space available!
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The problem is not alone regulations. It's getting the water and power utility infrastructure up and running. Maybe slapping up two hundred new houses on a former bog is not something that can be handled by the existing, outdated, creaking at the hinges pipes. Digging holes in the ground will still take as long as it takes, even if an AI is handling the permitting.
"AI will speed up everything so much, productivity will zoom upwards and the economy will boom so that everyone gets the UBI abundantly" is a lovely dream, but it's still a dream.
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Although I agree with the fact that either end of the doomer spectrum is probably wrong, I have a hard time feeling good about AI and the future.
I will grant that the benefits of AI could be massive. Breakthroughs in the right hands will yield almost infinite positive possibilities. But how do we get to this altruistic future when so many nefarious actors are in the way? There are already some very rich and powerful people who wield techology to influence the voting habits of entire countries. Think of the possibilities for healthier food, efficient supply chains, medical breakthroughs, solutions to societies burning issues, yes, but also think of the possibilities for deception, social hijacking, wealth disparity, monopolies, and any other tactics used today, but multiplied by the power of AI.
I currently don't see how things will settle into a peaceful and supportive existence for all.
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Maybe tangential (and I apologize if this is not a direct response to you and may be more relevant a response to 2rafa's similar post below) but I think the largest innovation of LLM's that no one seems to really grasp or state explicitly is the speed of response of these models. It is not just that they can do some of your work, it is that they can do some of your work in seconds. I am self employed and work in ecommerce, and thanks to LLMs I can generate thousands of listings' worth of relevant keywords in plain English with great SEO in seconds. This work would have taken hours and hours of time to do it in the past, which does not mean I used to spend hours and hours doing it, it meant that I would come up with a solution that was much faster but much less effective than what I can do now. As a one-man show my work is significantly easier and faster than it was before LLM's. I am reaping the rewards of it every day. I am someone who has only worked one internship and spent about a year doing freelance work in my life, otherwise I have always been self employed. I feel so little empathy toward people whose entire careers have been working for someone else and who suddenly feel betrayed by their employers or afraid of being fired. You relied on others your entire life, and along comes the single greatest invention for self empowerment in centuries and instead of empowering yourself, utilizing the new powers of instant text generation trained on the knowledge of everyone ever, you worry about being replaced. Well, if you lack the self direction and discipline to harness new technologies then I just can't relate.
Similarly I don't understand the concern about people "not having anything to do" if they are on UBI. I work, actively, at a computer for about an hour a week, on average, and earn all of my money passively through that. I have never been bored and find plenty of meaning in my life. I have great faith that everyone else can - and frankly, should - live life in a similar way that I do. I spend much of my time traveling and thinking about philosophy and creating/designing when I am in the mood. I devote a huge amount of my time and energy to food and sex and relationships, but so do people who work full time jobs. I have never really accepted or bought into the mainstream modernist mode of work/life balance, see it as an abuse of power that I wouldn't accept for myself, and don't understand people who do- or these same people who fear its end.
Can you explain how you carried this task out? I thought that I had a very simple data cleaning task (a column had very non-standard date formatting that I wanted to very straightforwardly just change to year), and the LLM (copilot) just told me to write a formula that obviously wouldnt work. How do I make it just go row by row and write down the very obvious year?
I would recommend going to google's gemini, explaining what you want changed, and paste in the entire column of dates that you want to be changed. Ask for it to give you the results in a spreadsheet format. If it doesn't do the spreadsheet format right just ask for it in plain text with everything on a new row to copy paste. How many lines of data do you need to clean up? The more data you feed it the more chance for error. I would start with a smaller number (maybe 500 or less) to begin with, you may have to feed it a few times if you have like 10,000 rows or whatever.
You'd think it would be better to upload the spreadsheet and ask it to edit the spreadsheet how you want but in my experience the more extraneous data you feed it the more likely it is to mess up. Just doing it in the chat box window keeps it simple enough that it won't usually skip rows or get confused. You may have to explain the "very non-standard date formatting" in the worst case but it can probably figure it out on its own.
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Unfortunately, AI is coming to eat your lunch. Once AI agents get good enough (and people actually start using them), they will simply bypass your store and deny you your cut.
You may currently be providing a valuable service by connecting customers to the products they want to buy where they want to buy them, but AIs will soon be able to also do that at scale, and they demand a much, much smaller fee (often zero).
This is something I’ve tried to talk to smart people at work about who actively employ AI and they never seem to think through the implications.
Here’s one example I’ve given before - AI agentic sales outreach. For a brief 6 months, in 2024 orgs who adopted the ability to research contact, write “personalized” emails, and send cadences at scale had a super power. And a few startups got amazing buzz over it. Then it was table stakes and once everyone gets more in their inbox it becomes junk again.
If AI was good enough that you could send the exact right message to me at the exact best time to consider your product, the first 10 people would get an easy sale. But as soon as this is available to everyone of the 10 million businesses who think I should buy their product, it will just ruin email altogether.
This has always been an arms race but AI will not in the long run improve email outreach, but break it. I think this is going to be the same in a lot of areas
I was recently hiring a freelancer on Freelancers.com, and it was impossible to distinguish between them, they were all AI-written and virtually identical.
Yeah exactly, resumes are already an example where AI just broke the concept, not improved anything. You can argue that people could always get external resume help. But the friction was valuable information itself. That someone went out of their way to find and rely on another humans help and discern quality was in itself a signal so it was ok to not know whether this polished resume was self written or professionally assisted.
Now every resume is AI polished with the pus of a button. Instead of improving resuming anyway, it just broke the function
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Your livelihood is dependent on profiting from a temporary exploit whereby you can make money by unleashing AI slop at scale. When your boom times end (as all such temporary grifts do when everyone gets in on the game and antibodies develop) expect no one to feel empathy toward you. Rather than building a career or connections or creating something of value, you spent your time maximizing your own payoff with the "defect" button.
You seem very proud of this.
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You are a slop generator, one of those making the online experience worse for us all.
And hot singles in my area want to date me, and you earn $5,000 a month with this one simple trick?
Thanks for calling this out, though it may go against the rules of the forum. I do agree that it's quite frustrating to see people bragging about looting the commons via SEO slop generation and acting as if they are better than people working normal jobs. Sigh.
I have found search engines of all descriptions to have drastically gone down in usefulness due to (1) SEO crap and (2) AI crap (about twenty minutes ago a Google search returned me the completely wrong reply to a query because it was all optimised on 'AI' and 'SEO' terms), so that anyone who brags that they are contributing to clogging up the system via "I can now produce oodles of great SEO!" gets the side-eye from me the same as if they had bragged about their successful ransomware or phishing exploits.
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Well, this is the rub. The UBI skeptic's worldview is a fundamentally aristocratic one which does not share your faith in the average individual. The UBI skeptic generally agrees that there is an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices - he simply believes that lower-IQ or otherwise mentally disadvantaged people cannot say the same, and the happiness of a fraction of clever dilettantes is not worth leaving the Average Joe to rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth.
I don't, myself, find this picture convincing, though it is a failure mode which it is worth bearing in mind. It seems to me that to the extent the horror stories about self-wireheaded proles living off the dole have some basis in fact, the individuals at issue don't actually have much in the way of the option of traveling the world instead, so they don't prove much. Moreover I think this kind of willpower-sapped listlessness should be understood as a form of clinical depression, and could likely be addressed with antidepressants if all else fails.
Still, you said you "didn't understand" the doomer viewpoint on UBI - well, here goes.
Yeah, I find that opinion gross and evil and degrading to the average person to the extent that I don't understand where it comes from. The people they're imagining will do poorly without a job are frankly mostly already living without a job, and have done badly in school, which was difficult for them to begin with. Anyone who is doing fine with a job already will do fine without a job too.
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As a UBI skeptic, that's not my view. I agree that there is "an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices". And a much larger group of people who will fit the stereotype "rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth." But if UBI let everyone do what they wanted, that would be fine. I'm a skeptic because I don't believe in the implied abundance; someones going to have to produce all those nachos for the average Joe, and the videogames, and the electricity. And that's either going to be that first group, or some other group outside those mentioned -- no magic robot is going to do it for them. So you've got a group doing all the work, and a group reaping the benefits for nothing; that's not utopia, that's slavery. Talk to me about UBI when you've created the magic robots, and not before.
This is a perfectly reasonable take, but a completely different thing than what I meant (and took @aiislove to mean) by "UBI skeptic", ie someone who believes that even if it could be implemented as advertised, a UBI would not be good for a majority of humanity. I think, insofar as it is ever worth discussing ideals rather than short-term ends, this is an interesting conversation in its own right, separate from the object-level AGI-by-2027-vs.-moribund-AI-bubble debate which determines how soon if ever we might get the magic robots.
Define "good for". If you waste your life playing video games, but you would otherwise have starved to death, is that good for you? I would say that it is, ignoring semantic questions about whether "better" counts as "good".
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I too am a sceptic because of this. If we replace all the labour (or as much as we can squeeze out) with the magic robots, we are not likely to see "and MacroFruitCountenaceBigBigBank happily handed over 80% of their yuuuuuge profits to pay UBI for the 90% of displaced labour force".
Jeff Bezos was able to afford to rent out Venice for his second wedding. That money did not go into UBI. Same with the future: governments will tax what they can, corporations will avail of what loopholes they can, them that has, gits.
And governments may not even tax what they can, see the comedic saga of the government in my country being forced to accept €13 billion in back taxes from Apple, while it did its very best to refuse it (due to fears of "if the EU makes the American multinationals which prop up our economy pay up, they are likely to leave Ireland and then we're effed"). Same with UBI taxes: if it is too onerous a burden, the corporations will move overseas and good luck prying a cent out of the robotic hands.
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It seems pretty likely to me that the "magic robots" are coming. Why can't computers run an electricity generation facility? It's because they lack something which humans have. You can call that "know-how," "intelligence," "dexterity" or something else, but whatever it is, computers are getting better all the time at duplicating human skills. So it's reasonable to hypothesize that magic robots will be here sooner or later. And probably sooner rather than later.
That being said, it's been observed that science fiction writing is not about predicting the automobile but rather about predicting the traffic jam. My concern with UBI is that it will lead to unintended and negative consequences. So that instead of a utopia, we'll get something much less pleasant. What will happen to some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise if suddenly billions of people have the time and resources to visit it? What will happen to marriage and family formation if your typical woman no longer needs help or financial support from any man? What sort of laws will the citizenry ask for if they have all the bread and circus they can handle but still aren't receiving the social status they think they deserve (because it's mathematically impossible for magic robots to create an abundance of social status)?
On a tangent, and relevant (I hope) to the vexed TFR question which gets debated on here: I don't know how many on here are married/partnered with children, but let me pose a question to the guys.
If you came home from work this evening and your wife/girlfriend says "Honey, great news, I'm expecting a baby!" what would be your reaction:
(1) Wonderful, now we can start having the big family I always wanted! This is the best surprise I ever got!
(2) Wait, you're what? We didn't plan for this. Isn't it too soon? There's so much we haven't done yet, are we even ready to start having kids?
Given that my wife is 45, was subfertile, and is now properly infertile after a botched IVF cycle when we tried for a third child that way, there would be loud rejoicing, expressing thanks for a miracle.
I do not think I am particularly unusual in thinking this way among older parents.
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For the sake of this question, shall I assume that I am recently married; that my wife is in her fertile years; and that we do not already have children together?
You can. Just that it's a surprise that you weren't expecting. Or maybe you already have one kid. Needn't even be your wife, as I said.
I'm very curious about the reactions when it comes to "oh, you expect me to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to having kids to save our crumbling TFR rate?" There's a heck of a lot of guys posting on here about "the solution is to force women to have babies", with one person exampling Afghanistan under the Taliban as the "you may not like it, but this is how you do it" as to getting women pregnant whether they agree or not.
I want to see if they're as eager about having three/four/six kids if the chickens come home to roost in their coop.
Then I would be perfectly fine with it.
One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I have only 2 children.
And by the way, if there were some magic genie who offered me a deal where (1) society would be changed such that smart women would be encouraged to marry and reproduce rather than pursuing advanced education or high powered careers; (2) I myself would marry and have a large number of children; and (3) instead of being a successful professional I would be pushing a mop in a sewage treatment plant, I would probably take the deal. (The main reason I wouldn't is if I believed that advances in AI are going to cause so much upheaval that it would be a moot point.)
What I mean is, I am potentially willing to give up the pursuit of money and social status for the sake of fertility so that I am not asking women to do something I wouldn't be willing to do myself.
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What reaction are you expecting? At least a third of our posters already have kids and regularly comment on how fulfilling they find it, and another third (myself included) are very vocally unhappy that they haven't been able to start a family. We have a few out-and-proud horndogs around but definitely below a third.
At the risk of being provocative, you seem to be very invested in this idea that 'boys only want one thing'. What would it take in terms of evidence to genuinely change your mind?
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Jerry Pournelle wrote about a solution. Not a pleasant, utopian solution, but I don't think the citizen islands from the codominium are that implausible.
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Depends how lifelike the robots are. You could imagine a world where people live surrounded by a Dunbar's-number's worth of robots (or VR simulations) that they can feel superior to, and scratch the itch that way. Or indeed, where we all become the omnipotent gods of our own little subjectively-infinite pocket universes. Not to say this is necessarily the outcome I root for or anything, but, could happen, conditional on sufficiently magic magic robots.
Yeah, I've wondered about that possibility myself. Fundamentally, the question is whether people would choose Nozik's Experience Machine over reality. Most people claim that they wouldn't (and personally I believe the reason is that they perceive that choice to be low-status) but what if it were marketed properly?
Hell, there's a !!fun!! question if it isn't an Experience Machine. What happens when everything but the 'people' are real? If you had immortality, I can think of worse ways to spend thirty years than a Primitive Technology meets Minecolonies run to really build an monument in the same sense that Sagan joked about making an apple pie from scratch.
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I will observe that the tension between "libertarian" (people flourish best left to their own devices) and, for lack of a better word "progressive" (we can steer people to be better souls) long predates AI. I don't think either side has clearly won there: drug addicts living on the streets of San Francisco are, IMO, pretty clearly neither living their best lives nor making the world a better place for the rest of us. I'll leave aside religious discussion of the innate value of human souls here.
The failures of the opposite extreme, trying to "immanetize the eschaton", as it were, are also pretty well documented in these parts. But this also isn't new with AI: it's the same argument as for alcohol prohibition a century ago. Ditto for similar vices throughout history. While I can accept universal Maslow-style enlightenment as an ideal post-scarcity society, I'm not convinced that it's possible to push people into that. That said, I think part of the role of a successful society is to achieve that self-actualization more broadly, although the methods for doing so are left as an exercise for the reader.
Yep. If you just look at the court cases in your local news, you will see how many people decide to spend their free time: drink, drugs, and criminality.
To be fair, for some of them that's not their free time, it's their career.
Not many career violent and property criminals nowadays - in a world where TVs are cheap, stolen phones get bricked remotely, and people don't carry large amounts of cash it isn't lucrative enough, particularly compared to drug dealing or online scams and fraud. In addition, sentences for repeat offenders are still harsher than they were in the Hippie Era such that you can't just write an occasional week in jail off as a cost of doing business.
There are specific niches where you see career property criminals, like shoplifting in San Francisco and fencing it on Facebook Marketplace, or pickpocketing tourists almost everywhere, but nothing like the situation in the 1990's where you could make a career as a burglar or mugger. Ask a beat cop or a local politician in a high-crime area and they will say that most property crime nowadays is committed by junkies who need cash fast for their next fix.
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And UBI just permits them to devote full-time attention to said career.
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We're headed for a dystopia where any sort of middle-class thinking man's job becomes either automated or massively difficult to get because of productivity gains. The rest of us will be needed for manual labor since AI is apparently still quite bad at handling physical objects in the real world.
I doubt it would take too long to develop dextrous robots once basic thinking is figured out. Just watching Boston Dynamics videos from the last 10 or 15 years you get the sense that a lot of progress is being made.
Besides, I think it's pretty likely that there will be a lot of workarounds. So for example, suppose that repairing a car requires too much manual dexterity for a robot. What's to stop people from just buying a new car when the old one breaks? Either way, auto mechanics lose their jobs.
@blooblyblobl did make a case that we're far off from fully human-capable robots, although specialized ones are obviously becoming more common.
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From your lips to God's ears...
Great! Now you can buy a shit-ton of cheap Chinese crap off Shein and Temu, but you still need to get ten other people as flatmates to rent someplace to live.
The economy somehow not crashing, some deflationary effects happening, and interest rates booming, would save the bacon of the tech right/abundance liberals - i.e. the only people seriously interested in making building housing a political issue. It's only a first step to making housing more affordable, but it's an important one, when you consider the political factions likely to benefit from an economic crash.
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Indeed you will, but that's because we don't build enough housing. GreatAI (or lack of useful AI) is not to blame.
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