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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Okay, you want to be a husband and father and are honest about it. That's good. There's still a lot of men who are pushing the angle that it's all the fault of women for [spin the wheel and pick your reason] no babies but who would run off to Antarctica the minute they got "Honey, I'm expecting!" message.
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