But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
And literacy rates are increasing. I don't know why you say it's not, just google "literacy rates trend".
I can cover every wall of my living space in flat screen color television more cheaply than feed, house, heal, and educate another child in my family.
That's why communism got so popular in some places and why after capitalism won, it demonized communism so much that people now think those are the only two options and communism is the bad one so capitalism must be the good one.
There are other options like mutualism or market socialism and people (including me until recently) have never heard of them.
Cooperatives exist and most people don't even know what that word means.
We need a system where ownership of both the means of production and more importantly the product goes to the workers. If production is more effective with an assistant ("manager") overseeing them, then can hire one and negotiate his salary collectively. If they need an investment, they can quantify the risk and agree how much the investor gets in return after how long but it should not give the investor a massive chunk of or complete ownership - at most it should give small ownership according to his hourly rate compared to other workers.
This scares me. Humans are getting so domesticated and docile they might soon be content with being pets. I am not sure US independence or French revolution could happen today.
I am obviously not a fan of crime against other peaceful individuals. But crime against an oppressive regime is still crime by that regime's rules.
That may be true. But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no.
> purchasing power is going down
That is not a new thing.
> quality of goods is going down
Phones are better. Computers are better. Cars, planes, washing machines ...
> life expectancy is decreasing
On the whole, this is not the case.
> child mortality is increasing
Globally?
> illiteracy is increasing
Globally?
You seem to have a negative view of things. And sure, many things are not great. But the examples you gave are not it.
Not even, I was taking the US as an example because they're at the front of this "tech will deliver us" hypothesis
It is some point where you just shut down your brain and feed yourself to the fishes?
Not being an US person I'm struggling with this. How? Unless one loses congnitive capability due to organic brain damage how is this even possible?
We call this stopping of work at that point retirement.
How about that?
I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.
And what is that exactly?
At best we seem to be rather large containers to ensure that genes get replicated.
Shed it already.
The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".
People are either proactive or reactive. Proactive think about the system and its incentives and how to align them for everyone's benefit. Reactive people only complain after they have been exploited.
Most people are reactive.
If AI is not a scam, we're gonna see a massive wave of unemployment and only then will many people realize they have spent half of their waking hours making someone else richer and they have no control over what they created.
And I don't meant just those who build AI. I mean everyone whose work isn't mostly manual/physical.
They're OK with open source code being turned into statistical patterns and plagiarized en masse. They will only start complaining once their work has been stolen and they are broke.
It's also why every empire in history collapsed.