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...
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.
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.
AI or no AI, the US will still have control over the economic activity inside of it. America is not pitched to be a ghost town, but instead a vastly productive and wealthy economy driven by AI. A ghost town cannot redistribute wealth it does not have, but America will still have all of the wealth.
Sorry, when did I vote in favor of the Citizens United, McCutcheon, or Buckley outcomes, all of which are tied to our current predicament of money in politics? And how is my voice, through my vote, able to change and possibly overrule those decisions? Until that happens, even the ballot box won't give me negotiating power versus the wealthy.
The five Supreme Court Justices who voted in favor of Citizens United and McCutcheon were all appointed by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Had either of those two not won the presidency, Citizens United and McCutcheon would have lost their cases against the FEC.
People can still vote for representatives who want to pass legislation to undo those cases through congress. There's nothing that's stopping people from voting in representatives who are in favor of this (yet).
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.
The core argument is that people don't want to be machines, and shouldn't do mechanical work, and that it's a shame if anybody feels compelled to work like a machine to survive. But then we have the job loss part, in which, because of automation, that person doesn't even have the option of working like a machine, and complains about it.
However, I'm coming round to thinking that the vision of a continual symposium-party is wrong anyway. I think automation can't do all that much, and creativity is needed in even the most mundane and dreary contexts. This means automation is less disruptive that it's purported to be - but is still somewhat disruptive - and the change in the nature of jobs is less of a shift to creativity - but is still a small shift to creativity. The jobs aren't delightful, people are still needed in factories, and there are no togas involved. This is my dreary insight.
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...
Speaking globally, there are many more barriers to feeding everybody than just abundance, like the other guy said.