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I think a lot more people than you think derive meaning and value from their work. Maybe not a majority, but I'd say a large minority.
I, and a lot of people, don't even believe AI will ever allow the majority of us to live in luxury. Personally, I believe that if AI were as good as it's touted as being, there will be a culling in the best case scenario. Worst case scenario would still be Skynet. (Bit of a tangent, but part of me actually thinks that if AI gave us functional immortality and infinite luxury, that that result might be a worse hell than any other. This isn't based on anything other than my feelings.) But if nothing changes, and things simply continue to be as they are, it would still be a disastrous result as that would mean that hundreds of thousands of people have lost and will lose their livelihoods and futures because we as a society were sold a bill of goods by an entire industry of charlatans.
All that is to say that we've sacrificed the livelihoods and futures of people today for future benefits that I don't think exist. And if these benefits do exist in the future, I don't think the vast majority of people will ever be party to them.
I think this is a lot of cope. If we didn't have washing machines I think a lot of people might derive a sense of personal definition from being responsible for keeping people's clothing clean. Now that this labor isn't necesary it is a trivial thing. People will find a way to self define and fine meaning without the need to do labor.
Why? If it can do our work trivially why would there be a culing? We don't cull people currently who can't or won't do value added labor. Many of these people live lifes of relatively luxury to those in the distant past and that's with few voters feeling direct kinship with them. The idea that people who are themselves threatened with unemployment are going to vote to cull unemployed people beggars belief.
If you're taking this seriously then data center moratoriums are trivially not sufficient and you should absolutely be advocating for bilateral treaties with china to cease frontier development. If you're not advocating for that then I don't want to hear about random data center blocks which will not and cannot prevent this.
I'm sorry, are they delivering the goods or not? Because if they are delivering the labor replacement then they are not charlatans. Your lot have this weird way of accusing them of being hype artists while your premises buy entirely into what they're selling. If they can indeed substitute all labor then that is incredible and they are fully vindicated for the rhetoric. If they aren't then we don't have to worry about any of this. It's a very clear sign that what you're actually concerned about is hurting them because you hate them and are not thinking clearly at all.
A vote is just representation of leverage that a citizen has. The actual leverage is mostly the useful work a citizen can provide to society (An average citizen, given that the franchise does not differentiate). Maybe the guns, for the few Americans who can actually muster an organized militia.
Without any of that leverage, how much weight do you think the vote will have?
When you and those who agree with you say things like relieving people of the need to labor, what it sounds like is that people will be "relieved" of one of two ways of getting vital resources from people who control those resources through precedent or force. The other way is more force, and it doesn't look good, not when the enemy has drones and superhuman security AIs.
(There is a third way, claiming resources that no one got to yet, but we'll need mass cheap far space travel to make that viable again).
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I think the question whoever in charge of AI would ask is if AI can do our work trivially, what's the point of having so many people around at all?
Keep in mind that is scenario would be that AI eliminates 99.9% of jobs, as you described. In this hypothetical future, I don't even believe there will be any voting. Society will essentially be controlled by the AI and the few who actually still work to maintain or guide the AI. That's what I mean by turn people into pets or cattle.
I do, and I would support a politician that made this a part of their platform. I'm only a private citizen, however, without a platform. So I can only reach as far as my immediate circle.
We're getting points mixed up because I've described multiple potential scenarios and did a poor job of separating them. Here are what I see as likely futures under three different scenarios:
AI is everything the marketing says it will be.
Under this scenario we have three likely futures.
AI is benevolent and everything works out like you appear to believe it will. This is probably the best result. It's also the least likely, in my opinion.
AI is benevolent but only for a select few. This is the culling scenario I describe. The AI heads or AI itself eliminate 99.9% of all jobs and look around and start wondering why they bother keeping all these people around. This is the second most likely scenario if AI is all it's cracked up to be, in my opinion.
AI is malevolent. This is the scenario covered by James Cameron. Obviously this is probably the worst result. If you ask me, this is the most likely out of the three described so far.
AI is pretty good, but not the paradigm changing technology we were sold as.
I'd say this is where we currently are. Productivity is slightly up, but we've also created an increasing underclass. Productivity is not up enough, however, for us to implement UBI or similar policy, meaning these people will just have to suffer as a permanent underclass. In this scenario, The AI heads would still have oversold and underdelivered. Maybe we haven't been sold a complete bill of goods, but we'd still have greatly expanded the permanent underclass for what? A 20% increase in GDP?
AI is not and will never be as good as the marketing.
Under this scenario, we've done like I said. We've ruined hundreds of thousands of lives and been sold a complete bill of goods. In this scenario, I'd be advocating for public executions of the major AI executives.
Edit: I didn't address one of your points
Do people do this right now? If you took someone off the street and told them that they don't have to work in the future and everything they need will be paid for, do they find a way to self define and find meaning? Do lottery winners self define and find meaning? If people don't do this right now, what will have changed between now and the omniscient AI that will cause them to self define and find meaning in the future?
It is already the case that half of all people are not net tax payers. Where is the culling?exist
Organizing against local datacenters, or worse American data centers in general, will do less than nothing against xrisk. It's acting frantically impotently to discharge your anxiety. We don't e on a sprectum where relative resistance to American data center buildout moves any levers on chance unaligned ASI is reached.
But those people still have value. They might be a net negative to you but they still have value. They use EBT funds to buy products that circulate the economy. They buy crack and fentanyl that funds the CIA. They can be whipped up by demagogues to riot in support of current thing. In extremis, you can draft them and use them as meat waves on the European steppe. Two percent of the entire male population of America is in prison, Burgerland would have penal battalions coming out their asses.
That’s a totally different scenario to them literally having no economic or military or political value at all.
The idea that we're sending disabled and elderly people enough money to live on every month merely so that some shadowy elite might be able to use them for violence is a monument to the insanity caused by populism. There is a much simpler explanation for why we don't cull people who are net fiscal drains. Our nation is actually meaningfully a democracy and we do meaningfully, to the degree it's possible, usually get what we vote for. Now of course politicians lie about what's possible or promise multiple mutually exclusive things so we don't always get exactly what we're promised on the campaign trail, but we don't usually get exactly the opposite, at least not durably.
But democracy, and popular stakes in government in general, hails from a time where the median member of the population was much more important to keeping the lights on than today or than they would be in the total automation scenario. Would these sort of participatory systems have evolved at all if e.g. feudalism had given way to the AI age immediately and the noble lords would have never needed to engage with upstart capitalists and urban middle classes at all? The marginal economic and military value of human labor dropping to 0 fundamentally undermines the reason why power and resources have to be shared in the first place, worse even it removes many disincentives to not monopolize them, and it's IMO plausible that the inertia of existing institutions like e.g. the welfare state won't be able to prevent that reality from manifesting itself indefinitely.
Another aspect is that full automation makes that fact more legible than before. We may already have many millions of people who realistically contribute nothing and are essentially parasites on the generosity and productivity of the rest of society, but all of this generally still runs under the pretense that these people are temporarily embarrassed productive workers. Even leftists, who generally don't feel the same moral revulsion towards being on welfare that e.g. (American) conservatives do, like to frame these expenses as educational, transformative, investments etc., that will eventually result in an overall better-off society. That framing obviously collapses if no human can hope to contribute productively ever again.
This, big time. Full Automation is Human Obsolescence is Human Extinction, given a modicum of time.
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It hasn't happened yet because there isn't enough control yet. I'm not sure that you appreciate just how big of a change your ideal AI future will be. In your ideal AI future, the levers of power would necessarily be concentrated with the AI or the people responsible for its decisions. I'll pose a question to you. Suppose you can tomorrow, with a snap of your fingers, make your ideal AI future become reality in the US. But in the process, you'd have to liquidate the bottom 10% of the US population. Would you do it? What about 20%? 30%? How much of the population are you willing to liquidate to realize your ideal AI future?
Ok so what do you actually suggest I do? Say I'm a private citizen who one, doesn't not support the AI future and two, would like to stop AI development world wide. How do you suggest I act to achieve these goals?
This underlying claim isn't actually true. Overall average income is something like 50k per year, but that includes college students, stay-at-home mothers and stuff. If you narrow your parameters to an age-range like 30-50, the average income is more in the area of 80k or so per year, which is high enough for most people to be net tax payers. Super-high income earners don't distort it enough to make it not so.
A more accurate appraisal is that of people who work at all, most eventually graduate to become net tax payers and are the backbone of overall society, and of people who work minimally or not at all, these are often college students and mothers who are playing an important role in society of their own. They are a necessary cost the system must bear to sustain itself.
The idea that most people are freeloaders or minimum wage Walmart staff is popular around here, but does not measure up to actual statistics.
This is just copium/wishcasting and doesn't pass the sniff test given most developed countries have a progressive tax system and run yearly deficits. Plus, you are still a lifetime net fiscal negative even if you're a net-taxpayer in your prime years but it's outweighed by the degree to which you were a net-tax consumer in your early and senior years.
Take the US, for example. It spent $7.04 trillion in fiscal 2025 with a population of 342 million, or about $20,460 per person. Playing around on SmartAsset shows one would need to make about $98,000 as a single person taking the standard deduction to cover the $20,460 through both federal income and FICA taxes. Suppose we consider a net-tax payer one who is able to cover this amount. It's a simplifying step since it allocates overall government expenditures pro rata per person, but it allows us to do some interesting Noticing.
Taking a peek at dqydj: in 2025, median individual income peaked at ages 52-53 at $70K (with a blip of $70K at age 65 and another blip of $72K at age 72, likely related to SS fully vesting and RMDs for retirement accounts), well short of $98,000. Furthermore, this only includes those "who worked (or wanted to work)." So not only does the median worker (or aspiring worker) not make enough to be a lifetime net-tax payer, he or she never makes enough to be a net-tax payer in any given year (assuming all years over his or her lifetime are similar to 2025). Only at the 67th/68th percentile of age-53 workers does income hit $98,000, much less workers as a whole.
Poors and mids are hard-carried by higher-earners fiscally. This would be consistent with other findings such as, in the US, the bottom 50% of tax-payers contribute only 2.3% of federal income taxes paid and the bottom 75% contribute only 11.5%.
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It would be nice to give an actual source.
Average consumer unit: Income 104 k$/a, size 2.4 people including 1.3 earners
Median consumer unit: Income 74 k$/a, size 2.4 people including 1.8 earners
Average consumer unit led by a person of age 25–54: Income 125 k$/a, size 3.0 people including 1.7 earners
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There is a difference between less tedious busywork and having no contribution to your own upkeep. There is a reason there is a death spike shortly after retirement. It's hardly crazy to suspect we have relevant instincts here. The survival advantage is obvious.
We evolved from creatures that hunted in bands and were probably murdered by our kin shortly after we could not longer provide for ourselves. I'm confident in a post work society we can conjure up meaningful games to substitute for the drudgery of what is currently required to upkeep society. Tons of people today make their living in some way derivative of professional sports and many people generate a great deal of their identity from sports teams. Same for celebrities or entertainers. A lot of the economy has already been separated from what is required to survive.
I think we sometimes read to much into occasional invocations of lifeboat ethics (like the Inuit ice floe retirement home) or stone-age incidents of war crimes. There are Paleolithic graves that archeologists have found of obviously disabled people who were clearly cared for their whole lives.
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vs
Hmmm...
I'm describing a trajectory. As we've found ourselves more wealthy and able to automate labor we have gone from occasional cold indifference to deaths of those who can not contribute to willing to spend heroic amounts of effort and expense to wrestle 6 more months for grandma against nature. The callous world you scare yourself with is a fiction of your imagination.
"fiction of my imagination", "state of nature"; potato, potahto.
We are only a hundred years out from the state of nature in the west; swathes of the world are more or less still there -- I don't think we can take for granted that backsliding is impossible. Especially if we are postulating something as bizarre as non-human superintelligence.
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It provides a value that can be traded for what is required to survive. I think you underestimate the psychological impact of being wholly redundant and superfluous.
Somewhere between 40 and 80% of Americans are already not net tax payers. Being redundant and superfluous is a spectrum that all of us are on. There are precious few who if they disappeared today would break the system badly enough to cause a blip. We're a long way from when most people worked on the farm and had a tangible hand in their own survival. As far as most of us are concerned food production is already functionally automated. Most of the basic necessities are already functionally automated. Besides housing, because it's rivalrous, what it took too survive in the 1800s could be provided by the state pretty trivially and with a bit of focus for a couple years with minimal human input. It's just not the case that humans need to be on the beating pulse of survival to find meaning in their lives. We'll be perfectly find with whatever social hierarchy game we entertain ourselves with once our survival is guaranteed.
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