[tonygrue]

My thoughts are a few:

There is a lot of undone labor in the world. In developing countries the middle class has drivers, cooks, housekeepers. That’s only possible due to inequality. With automation we can all get that.

These people with tons of help by and large live fulfilled lives. You find fulfillment in family, friendships, and non necessary creation (art, research, etc); whatever makes you happy.

But most of all, the Industrial Revolution made people think we’d all be idle and nothing can be further from those predictions. Many more people, and many more jobs, and most of the world still lives in relative poverty and various forms of insecurity and unmet material and labor needs.

Finally there are a lot of problems we have (thousands of health conditions, the environment, autocrats) that will prob take centuries to tackle even with ai, robotics, and being freed up from menial labor.

[aljgz]

As optimistic as your comment is, the fact that there are lots of problems does not mean that we will tackle them. In my opinion, if we don't aim at doing anything about it, the gap between the rich and the poor will widen. Both between societies, and within one society. I'm now in Canada, but in my childhood country, most of the recent "smart" (meaning connected) devices and the recent AI models are not available. This is starts a viscious cycle that makes things worse and worse. For the less connected high teck devices, the ratio of the price (That's set based on supply/demand in the richest countries) to income (that's damanged by sanctions and general government stupidity) is getting so high that it's really hard to get high-end devices.

As the labour required to produce goods and services is automated, one possible scenario is that fewer and fewer people will stay "relevant", while the rest will sink and become invisible.

Things can be avoided, but looking at countries that have been unable/unwilling to ensure housing (as one of the 3 most fundamental material needs of the human: food, housing, clothing) stays affordable, does not raise hope. In my opinion, the housing problem is extremely easy to solve when looking at the problem as a technical one, and impossible when you include the way economic incentives are working at it.

I hope I'm wrong, but when I project the current path into future, it's not bright.

[seventhtiger]

Is our goal to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, or to improve the lives of the poor? Because the gap itself is actually irrelevant to poor people's lives. Rich people's improvement outpacing poor people's is not necessarily an issue.

Second, a financial gap does not necessarily translate to a material gap. Someone with 1,000,000x someone else's net worth still buys the same iPhone and drinks the same coca cola. Many important wellbeing factors are not actually blocked by finance, like healthcare and education. Even if you take all the rich people's money and repurpose to education not much will change. Maybe an iPad for every kid, but what good does that do?

Housing is actually a great example. Real estate has a way of sucking up entire GDPs worth of money. As a country you can't pay your way out of housing problems. Look at something like China which has been consistently overbuilding housing for decades now. They still have housing issues.

[tonygrue]

I share all your concerns. I considered mentioning them but figured I should keep my reply focused on idea of freeing people up isn’t inherently bad.

In particular zero sum resources like land ownership will be an increased challenge.

And our governments have been slow to respond to things like climate change and we could be slow to respond here.

[insane_dreamer]

> But most of all, the Industrial Revolution made people think we’d all be idle and nothing can be further from those predictions.

The Industrial Revolution is often used as a benchmark of sorts for how society will adapt to a new technology that eliminates many of the jobs that were previously needed. But what is very different with AGI, or something close to it (i.e., a robot that can learn to do almost any physical job, an AI software that can learn to do almost any digital job), is that there is no new set of jobs that humans can turn to since, by definition, a physical or digital AGI should be able to learn those too. So even if humans discover a whole new set of professions -- as we did with factories and then with computers -- companies will quickly train robots/AIs to do those better and faster.

[fraboniface]

Creation is the single most fulfilling human experience after having children (which is also creation). I'm not sure we want to take that away from us.

[prettyStandard]

No health problems if there's no people to have them.

[forgetfreeman]

Additionally issues around global carbon footprints quickly become tractable when you eliminate the bulk of humanity.

[amelius]

I'm curious, do we see a decline in art freshmen in recent years?

[BitPolice]

I'm not sure first year students always have selected a major, but if we go by degree at graduation, I think this article (and the charts therein) is useful: https://www.chartr.co/newsletters/2023-10-08

(n.b. No archive.org evergreen link available, alas)

> " 20 years ago, roughly 8% of all US bachelor degrees were attained in the 4 core humanities subjects — a figure that’s fallen every year since 2007, with the share now sitting at just 4% per data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Conversely, STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math) have been growing at an unparalleled pace, as students swap Charles Dickens for computational dynamics and Jane Austen forJavascript."

> "Indeed, computer science has risen from a 2.7% share of all degrees in 2009 to 5.4% by the end of 2022, while engineering has risen from 7.2% to 9.4% in the same time frame — more than double the share that the core humanities subjects currently occupy."

[rqtwteye]

"Finally there are a lot of problems we have (thousands of health conditions, the environment, autocrats) that will prob take centuries to tackle even with ai, robotics, and being freed up from menial labor."

I am very worried that autocrats will use AI and robotics to get rid of the opposition problem. I can't even imagine what Hitler or Stalin would have done with the technology we have now or will have soon.