alt Hacker NewsIt's just Neo Luddite stuff... we don't have to accept the current status quo. Good lord I'd love it if all my needs were met by the abundance of the planet and I could spend my days working on projects I liked and exploring.
Why can't anyone see beyond their job?
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defrost • today at 1:14 AM
It's not the no job part that troubles them, it's the question of where basic levels of food, clothing, shelter are going to come from, and the means to have objects of desire and the freedom to travel.
Maybe you can't see that, but for a good many people hovering about the knife edge of just getting by such things are a pressing concern.
Perhaps in future Halcyon days when all needs are met joy will be had by all .. right now there's a looming gap of uncertainty for many.
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Magical wishful thinking is as misguided as even the most rabid anti-tech critique.
Your - piloto_ciego - needs will never be met by the abundance of the planet. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren may begin to live in such a free way, but you and everyone else alive now will not. There are too many people on the planet, wealth is too unevenly distributed, food production is too unevenly distributed, water is too unevenly distributed, energy production is too unevenly distributed; the only way anyone can get their needs met is by participating in an economy which can allocate and relocate those scarce resources.
All AI is doing is taking an increasingly large share of those resources in pursuit of ensuring the survival of an ouroboros of circular funding between a tiny number of companies to the detriment of everyone else attempting to participate in that economy.
AI may or may not prove to be a significant step on the ladder to the ultimate end of scarcity, but there is no possible way that anyone you could conceivably meet, much less be, will ever experience the kind of life liberated from toil that you wish for.
Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
The best you can hope for is to exploit the technology selfishly, carving out a life of scholarly pursuit and passion projects while rent-seeking on top of the economic work of humans who couldn't get there as fast as you. But that has been an option since the invention of money.