Seems we are digging our graves as a species and don't even realize it. I mean Sam Altman is already saying it taking 20 years to train a human is a Big Problem.
Of course, intelligence will be a solved problem so "20 years of training" won't be needed. You'll just be the hardware. AI will tell you to pick up that box, place it on that conveyor belt, place the autowelder at that seam and wait for the green light, turn the wrench to install bolt B in part C. If you don't wish to, or no longer can, so be it. Another, hungrier human will replace you. After all more are made every day, and they are capable of doing this type of labor by age 10 or so. And what else would they do with their time, go to school and get a completely useless education?
All of this will of course be in service of our technofeudal lords, the owner class. Some robots will be needed for heavy lifting and for the jobs that are too sensitive to trust a human in, like personal security and strikebreaking. Can't risk trusting a serf for those tasks. But for most physical grunt work humans will be cheaper. Shockingly cheap, when they have no other options.
Did that make you less depressed?
In that sense I see their higher cost as temporary. Another factor: robots will not rise up and blow up your factory. They will always work at the same efficiency for each and every robot produced. They will not go on hunger strikes. They will not kill themselves.
If all you have to offer people is this kind of sad fucking "2.5 meals a day and a small shelter" while you live on yachts and eat like a king, eventually they will gang up and kill you
I’m looking around the world and thinking this “eventually” isn’t happening very fast.
Not an optimistic thought.
But maybe Altmans AI will break out and do it for us.
Oh, many of us realize it, but doing anything about Moloch is much, much harder.
I should not need to justify my existence, that is the problem with being led by psychopaths.
Twenty years to train humans for what? A tech job? That is not why we get an education. It is not my purpose to be a cog in the wheel for some psychotic billionaire.
Also, customers outsource the risk to their vendors, so as long as there's someone to sue, nobody worries about doing it right. Ship it now and pay the lawyers later.
Humans will kill us by it damage amplifying their worst characteristics.
Thus we'll die of a pandemic because some idiot LLM'ed up positive looking virology data when they were being too lazy to verify something. Everyone will trust it because they don't really care as long as it looks about right.
And then we won't need to, because at that point it will be too late.