It's an ideological thing. (We just had a conversation about ideology actually, remember?)
Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.
For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers meant no production happened.
Now, there's finally a chance at salvation. The capitalist Messiah is AGI and it will finally deliver them from those annoying laborers.
This ideological bent is why they're putting everything they have into AI. It's why VCs and their fellow capitalists are going so crazy.
They see it as a way to finally solve the contradictions of their ideology, but in reality it'd only create a new one: If everyone's out of a job, who will buy their products?
If they had AGI, why would they need consumers anymore? Just use your drone army to secure all natural resources and produce whatever you need for yourself. Other humans are just pets.
If AGI had a drone army, why would it need them?
Can't help wondering if they've really thought this through.
And this is why we need to escape the permanent underclass.
How about we don't create one instead?
It's not a choice we have, unless you want to figure out a global AI ban treaty.
AI will make human thought economically useless. In the new economy, the one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.
> The one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.
This is correct. But we don't need to ban AI to avoid the permanent underclass nightmare.
It's time for the means of production to be owned communally.
It's either a cybersocialist utopia or a neofeudalist dystopia.
Rosa Luxemburg formulated it pretty well more than a hundred years ago: Socialism or Barbarism!.
What kind of political leverage do the useless have? This isn't a realistically sustainable outcome.
Today, people have leverage because removing them has real economic consequences. With AI, we need to be on the useful side of the divide to have any leverage.
And then we'd better hope AI has respect for property rights.
I wish I was smart enough to credibly promise capitalists they could replace all their workers.
It doesn't matter that I can't do it. They'll pay me lots of money if they think I can.
> Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.
The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. (read on HN, not my words)
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