People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.
I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.
Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.
Because democracy basically means, government, by the people, of the people, for the people. But the people are...
Every industry is being pitched as becoming a ghost town. Democracy will not save us. We will all die in the future and not be replaced. This is the end of our line in this century. I hope you are proud of how far we’ve come because this is the end for us. There will be no economic justification for humanity quite soon and we will likely be slaughtered to eliminate latent variability.
It's impossible to predict when they happen, or their outcomes. The world may be worse at least for a while after them. Or they fail in general.
But they happen and then all the people who were crowing about the inevitability of some existing order and now it embodies natural law and what not look really f*ckin stupid in retrospect.
People believed in the divine right of kings with the same full earnestness of people on this forum who have think AI is just the outcropping of some transcendent mathematical telos.
Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity.
I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away.
Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.
It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either.
We will pay people.
Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.
[0] https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-pe...
Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.
It's this "path of least resistance life style" that ruins a lot in our society. Yes, being wasteful is bad, but not appreciating the work is also bad.
Also, I find it odd that of all the automation being attempted with LLMs, we're automating the ones that actually are interesting, not the ones that are dangerous or truly rote, yet highly mechanical.
People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.
1. Have sex
2. Break things
3. Play videogames
Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.
Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.