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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I'm sure others have seen this, but AutoGPT is here, a framework that lets instances of GPT call other instances of GPT to create complex task chains with no human input. In other words, it lets GPT instances prompt other instances to complete projects. Only about a week after being released, the examples are staggering.

This is an example of BabyAGI automating a sales prospecting pipeline, something I can say from experience normally takes a typical sales rep at least half a day to do. We can already automate it, and pretty well. This type of thing wasn't possible a week ago.

There are all sorts of other examples, and it's clear that massive automation is happening. I'm willing to bet we'll reach 30% unemployment in five years. If not sooner. The question becomes - what do we do about it?

The standard liberal answer is Universal Basic Income, and many on the left seem to think it will just magically appear once the government realizes the economic power of AGI. Problem is even if we get the buy-in from the political class, the implementation of UBI is not a simple undertaking! The funding, distribution, and potential impact on inflation alone are going to cause monstrous headaches and take years to work through. Plus even if we do have UBI, the potential of widening income inequality is insane, as those who own and control AGI technology stand to reap substantial profits, further concentrating extreme amounts wealth in their hands.

Another solution, favored by some conservatives, is to focus on retraining and upskilling the workforce. While I get the general direction here, I highly doubt a retraining program could possibly be enough to counter the rapid pace of automation. Furthermore, not everyone will have the aptitude or desire to transition into highly technical or specialized fields, which may leave a significant portion of the population without viable employment options. "Learn to code" just doesn't hit the same when software devs are going to be replaced as well.

Even if we get lucky enough to have both UBI and massive retraining, it may not be enough!

Why not get the government to throw some cash at massive infrastructure and public works projects? We could take a page out of the 1930s New Deal playbook and create a boatload of jobs in all sorts of industries. I've rarely seen anyone discuss this, but it may be necessary as it was during the Great Depression. Plus, it'd boost the economy, help repair our public infrastructure, and maybe even help tackle climate change if we invest in green tech. We could even turn this impetus towards space...

Last but not least we've got the potential impact of automation on mental health and societal well-being. We're already in the middle of a Meaning Crisis. As we increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to perform jobs and soon everyday tasks, we've got to ensure that people are still able to find purpose and meaning in their lives. This probably won't be what we've traditionally looked to, such as the arts or writing, since AI is already making that irrelevant.

Perhaps we will finally realize the importance of community in our lives and to our happiness, and start adding economic numbers and frameworks to those who create social goods. Have the government fund people to run local meetup groups, or help their neighbors with tasks, volunteer at old folks' homes, etc. It's a bit of a bludgeon solution right now, but we could refine things over time.

At the end of the day we all know the rise of AGI is going to be a shitshow for a number of reasons. I've outlined some potential solutions or stopgap measures to prevent the breakdown of society, but how does the Motte think we can navigate this change?

A welfare state is not a post-employment/automated society. In a welfare state as you describe, productive people are doing productive work and the rest are taking advantage of their production to avoid doing so. But all the necessary productive work is being done and ultimately being done by people (even if they use machines as force-multipliers to do it). This is different in kind from an automated society where the productive work is done without the people.

A welfare state is not a post-employment/automated society. In a welfare state as you describe, productive people are doing productive work and the rest are taking advantage of their production to avoid doing so.

The question is who exactly are the "productive people" keeping all of us afloat.

How many people performing some activity for money are really necessary for society to function, and how many of them are just UBI in the most wastefully imaginable form?

Is this popular meme right?

Is Nicolas really the Atlas holding up the world by typing on his laptop all day?

If so, then utopia is really there. AI can do whatever Nicolas does faster and better, and Nicolas can be hanging on the beach with his friends.

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The question is who exactly are the "productive people" keeping all of us afloat.

It's an interesting question, but not relevant to the difference between a welfare state and a post-employment/automated society. All that matters is that category exists. And it does. At a very basic level, someone driving a tractor, operating mining equipment, or working on an assembly line making (e.g.) ovens, is doing useful work. From this flows more; there's some level of supervision necessary for that. There's some level of accounting needed. People have to build and repair on the machinery used. We need people to see to the health of the people doing all that. There's transport needed to get this stuff around. Etcetera. And each of those things themselves need some sort of support, and you can follow it out until a very large number of people who are many levels disconnected from the traditional "agriculture, mining, and manufacturing" are in fact doing productive work. We may suspect there's also a large number of people doing bullshit work (certainly I suspect that), but we know there's a lot of non-bullshit work being done by humans. In a post-employment/automated society there is not.

As for the meme, I have no idea what it's trying to express. If AI takes over one job category, and the people who do it go hang on the beach with their friends, we don't have a post-automated society, we just have more leeches. If AI takes over everything, that's another story.

As for the meme, I have no idea what it's trying to express.

That the "social contract" is the system by which the average frenchman subsidizes Africa, Africans coming to his land, boomers travelling the world and, and this is the amusing absurd addition, certifiably insane right wing degenerates like Varg. It's a common French complaint about taxation and rent seeking which are staples of French society.

The underlying impetus behind this is a truth that is conspicuously absent from the french debate on pensions, which is that as it stands the working man lives a worse life than a pensioner, and has no hope of ever living the life pensioneers are living today.

@Eetan is criticizing this view because the average white collar Frenchman is doing make work for his money and AI can also send emails around to make things happen, maybe.

In your words, the meme is saying boomers and foreigners are leeches, and the question is whether the people that work aren't already leeches also.