We can already see this happening from factories to McDonalds to software. All of these are limited, and to varying degrees. Humans still for now need to oversee these forms of automation.
But the likelihood of further consolidation of wealth and power are likely to follow in the coming decades if the past is any indicator. Government regulations may or may not work effectively enough.
But what happens when a significant portion of the population has no reliable work or fulfilling work. Capitalist societies need consumer spending and growth. What happens when consumers are unemployed due to automation?
UBI/BI (universal basic income) gets thrown around, but it will cost hundreds of billions if not trillion(s) in the future. Companies already lobby for things, I can only imagine the lobbying will intensify a lot more if governments try to further increase corporate taxes to offset the unemployment benefits/(U)BI they will need to provide.
It's easy to say, we'll figure it out. But when trillions of dollars are at stake, it seems likely they will be a lot of push back from the top N% to ensure they're not force to give away a bigger share of their money pie.
What are your thoughts? Try to provide deeper and thoughtful responses here rather than shallow comments.
This has been going on for a long time. We used to spend 30% of our people on growing food. Now we spend 3%, because we have combines instead of a bunch of field workers. A bunch of people could do something else - something more productive than field work. As a result, our society got richer, because of what those other people could do now that they weren't having to work in the fields.
What could you do if you didn't have to waste time, say, chasing memory leaks or core dumps or whatever? Could you do something a level up from what you're currently doing?
So for society as a whole, the impact is that we get richer. We can produce the same stuff with less human effort, so we can put more people onto inventing and building new things.
But for individuals, there's going to be a divide. Can you level up, or not? For those who can't or won't, they're going to be left behind, the way someone was left behind who is still trying to farm 40 acres with a horse-drawn plow. They can survive that way, but they're not going to prosper in the way that the surrounding society prospers.
I say that without any judgment on either the skills or the effort of those left behind. I am just saying that there will be people in that category. Society has to figure out how to minimize how many people are in that category. And for those in that category, society has to figure out what to do with them that preserves their human dignity and value, while not letting them impede progress.
To me, the only sane way we can survive this, is to make it possible for anyone to own their own AI, to distribute the means of production widely. If everyone has labor saving technology, at least there's a bit of a balance against the power of the 0.001%.
It's a dim hope, though. Given the state of computer insecurity, which has forced more and more of us into the walled gardens on the internet, I fear the same will be true of the use of AI, etc.
Computers CAN be made secure, but most of us on HN don't seem to believe it, what hope is there of fixing it for the world at large? If we can't control our own machines before AGI, what hope is there after it?
I've been pushing, in small but persistent amounts, this issue, but I feel pretty hopeless at times. We need capability based security at the foundation of things, in a profoundly desperate way. If general purpose computing is lost, all of the benefits of computing go to those who can afford to throw manpower at maintaining the status quo, while reaping all the benefits.
Even if the cost thing is figured out, UBI has other issues. If it's truly universal, recipents will be priced out of just about everything that involves competition, including housing. If it's needs based, it's hard to determine the proper recipients. This may also lead to underutilization of talent when the benefits are close enough to what a person who could get a job would end up receiving. It would be nice to see some large scale tests, but that still hasn't happened.