Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there’s a more appropriate one. AFAIK [email protected] is meant for news and articles only.
Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there’s a more appropriate one. AFAIK [email protected] is meant for news and articles only.
I don’t think that AI is as disruptive as the steam engine, or the automatic loom, or the tractor. Yes, some people will lose their jobs (plenty of people have already) but the amount of work that can be done which will benefit society is near infinite. And if it weren’t, then we could all just work 5% fewer hours to make space for 5% unemployment reduction. Unemployment only exists in our current system to threaten the employed with.
You might be right about the relative impact of AI alone, but there are like a dozen different problems threatening the job market all at once. Added up, I do think we are heading towards a future where we have to start rethinking how our society handles employment.
A world where robots do most of the hard work for us ought to be a utopia, but as you say, capitalism uses unemployment as a threat. If you can’t get a job, you starve and die. That has to change in a world where we’ll have far more people than jobs.
And I don’t think it’s as simple as just having us all work less hours - every technological advancement that was once said would lead to shorter working hours instead only ever led to those at the top pocketing the surplus labor.
Yes, I 100% agree with you. The ‘working less’ solution was just meant as a simple thought exercise to show that with even a relatively small change, we could eliminate this huge problem. Thus the fact that the system works in this way is not an accident.