alt Hacker NewsCame here to say this. Nobody is saying "I want to work forever", we're saying "can we not replace work while our entire global civilization is predicated on working to survive?"
JFC, if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly. More people need to think of immediate systemic impacts instead of the high-fantasy post-work future the AI folk are selling.
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No they won't. You're missing the other half; if labor becomes free, the fruits of that labor become exceedingly cheap or even free.
See: the rapid drop in cost of food, manufactured goods, etc as automation took over those sectors. No one starved when we automated farming; they got fat.
Keep everyone precarious and fearful, stringing together multiple bullshit jobs to make the rent, always one car repair or health scare away from the abyss.
Let owners/exploiters suppress the wages they pay workers in the name of efficiency.
Encourage owners/exploiters to relentlessly raise the prices workers pay owners/exploiters in the name of shareholder value.
Then say "there is no alternative", our civilization is predicated on systematic exploitation to survive, and if you try to change it now "everyone will die".
The owner/exploiter class is going to replace labor with capital like they always have.
The worker's enemy isn't the automation that eliminates work, the worker's enemy is is the owner/exploiter who weaponizes automation in their class war.
> if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly.
Don't worry, the economists will slap the label "natural readjustment of labour supply levels" on this phenomenon, and it will make everything morally better.
Edit: in fact, we have historic precedents in e.g. Indian famines and how the British administrations talked about them and handled them [0][1]. Ah, malthusianism and undisguised racism, what a mixture. Of course, nobody counts those as part of "the millions of victims of Capitalism".
[0] Rune Møller Stahl, "The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-Faire Ideology and Famine in Colonial India": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304189843_The_Econo...
[1] Jayant Chandel, "Political Economy of Famines in the British Empire: An Analysis of the Great Famines in India from 1876–1879" (PDF): https://www.journalofpoliticalscience.com/uploads/archives/8...