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All this simply assumes that which has yet to materialize. You assume that AI is going to remove the need for much human labor, but that hasn't happened yet, and might never happen. Marx's predictions didn't come true, as most predictions do not. One can always claim that they just haven't happened yet, but that's a fool's argument. The world has ended (according to predictions) roughly every year of human existence. Jesus still hasn't come back, and Paul was certain it would happen in his lifetime. How many christians know better than Paul? Yet we have this idiotic eschatology.
Yes, everything Marx, Paul and Nostrodamus predicted might come true next year. But the odds are that it will not.
This smacks of nothing so much as viewing the current world, realizing that it's not going to change, and fantasizing about a hypothetical that is at least physically possible that would actually produce major change in society.
Call me when the AI replaces my job, and we'll talk revolution. Until then, hypothetical political systems for hypothetical economies that do not yet exist is intellectual soggy biscuit.
I'd have to agree here. All this talk about mass unemployment (soo many times over, often accepted as an inevitability) and I am really left scratching my head as to whether was it me or them who slept through Econ 101.
Here's a definition of Economics. "The study of the allocation of scarce resources".
Here's that definition extended. "The study of the allocation of scarce resources among agents with infinite wants".
Do we really live in a world where everything that has to ever be done has been done? Or do we have everything we want and we just.. stop wanting? If AI just makes a gazillion times what we have, I can see us wanting gazillion + 1, and the market will incentivize companies to produce that +1 using all the resources at their disposal, this includes humans, because I fail to see a universe where AI has total comparative advantage over humans in all things short of us living in VR worlds.
Customer service sucks? Well now instead of having one agent why not have 10, the cost of labor dropped to 1/10th its value anyways (but things are cheaper too). Yada Yada..
The real question is a massive exaggeration of socioeconomic inequality, not unemployment. CEOs can just have 1 guy to bring him coffee, 1 to bring him tea and another to bring him biscuits, as opposed to now where 1 guy brings all 3. But will humans accept a social structure where the overwhelming majority of them have the status of serfs even though they will probably live better than serfs do today?
I do too, but the old "wine and cloth" arguments' conclusions are only ironclad if you ignore both non-labor factors of production and negative productivity.
Non-labor: perhaps "3 guys who bring my coffee+tea+biscuits" have a comparative advantage over 3 hunks of motors and processors doing the same, but if the 3 robots need 2 kWh to do my day's menial tasks whereas the 3 guys need 6000 kcal (7 kWh) per day to stay alive, the robots might still be cheaper. Energy isn't perfectly fungible, there's all sorts of other costs to consider in both cases, etc, but my point is that the fact that humans can always find something productive to do is offset by the caveat that our productivity doesn't just have to exceed zero, it has to exceed a hard floor.
Negative productivity: human productivity doesn't always exceed zero! If reliability (in either positive or normative senses) is required for a job, the negative expected value of potential mistakes and crime can exceed the positive value of the work being done. Even the most haughty CEO-aristocrat has to also be wondering "will humans accept a social structure where the overwhelming majority of them have the status of serfs", for example, right? And if the answer isn't "definitely", then 3 potentially-pissed-off serfs might be too much more of a security risk than 3 potentially-hackable robots. If the upside to human labor is "my biscuits might be seasoned with their delicious salty tears" and the downside is "my tea might be seasoned with rat poison" then the CEO's valuation of human labor might be negative.
Metaphorically speaking, I feel like those salty tears might be just that delicious that it'd be worth the risk. The pleasure of having the submission of a regular human who was produced and born the old fashioned way is something that simply can't be replicated with AI, and it could end up being the most high status resource due to how much slower humans are to produce compared to AI, and also the expenses involved. It's still a dystopia, of course, and likely they could cut down the human population by 90%+ and still have enough servants to go around.
One scenario where AI could replace this would be some combination of amnesia + VR tech where the rich people pop themselves into a fully immersive world after erasing their memories of actual reality, thus allowing themselves to genuinely believe that they're being served by real humans while actually being served by VR. I think this wouldn't be attractive to most of the elites compared to having the real deal, and it also would be dangerous to themselves, since being lost in a virtual world would leave an opening for another elite to come along and take their stuff and/or kill them by developing their own AI to circumvent their AI defense systems.
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