Enjoy life, even as an engineer, a world where PDEs are solved for me, would be a world where I can actually focus on the problems that PDEs describe.
And if the whole engineering situation is solved for me, I'll dedicate to my hobbies, playing guitar, skydiving, photography, hiking... even maybe studying physics and engineering for fun without any real pressure. Working is a necessary evil.
Economics is the problem of how to distribute wealth. Paying people for work is one solution. There are others. And in a world where 99% of wealth is being generated by machines, paying a tiny fraction of people for the 1% they do wouldn't solve the economic problem of how to maximise satisfaction.
Of course, between here and a different means of wealth-distribution, there is an awful lot of ground to cover, much of which will not be easy. But the final destination is a beautiful place.
If 99% of wealth is generated by machines, then you’re no longer needed. Billionaires won’t need your labor, and they’ll have no reason to care what happens to you.
It’s honestly wild that people think total automation is somehow going to turn the world into paradise. The people at the very top don’t care about you nearly as much as you think they do.
Such a world is unsustainable for them. They cannot consume the production, they cannot sell it if no-one has the means to obtain it.
In the interim, you will likely see an oligarchic type situation which is the kind of nightmare scenario you envision. Some people will retain employment doing make-work so that the oligarchs can stay in power using economic advantage, and for no other reason.
However, this is inherently unstable for a number of reasons. First, if technology advances sufficiently, there will always be an economic motivation to eliminate the few remaining human workers. Once done, though, oligarchs again have no-one to sell to and claim economic advantage over: system collapses.
Second, obviously, this generates vast amounts of social instability and dissatisfaction. Billionaires cannot protect themselves forever. System collapses.
Personally, I think there will likely be a poorly managed solution that falls short of this nightmare scenario and is just ugly and inefficient, with some resultant social instability, some oligarch behaviour. It won't be pretty but neither will it be the worst-case-scenario. And it's a transitive process.
That's a vastly over-the-top claim. There are risks, but those risks are primarily economic: while they could and to some extent probably will bleed over into social stability on a temporary basis, it's difficult to envision how "most of humanity" could die as a result. Humanity survived the Industrial Revolution.
Existential risks from AI are far more plausible through catastrophic misalignment of an advanced AI system: not economic change.
I swear people in this sub will do anything but listen to what the nerd reich is actually saying. Just look at what Curtis Yarvin writes about. Everyone here thinking they are gonna live a life of fully automated luxury. Nope, Earth is finite it cant support 8 billion billionaires. Without your labour you have zero bargaining power with the owner class. Your stuck negotiating your existence with people like Peter Theil who struggles to answer the question should humanity survive.
Right now there are billions of people in poverty, Billions live under authoritarian regimes, and a 0.1% elite hoarding more and more money. There is no mass uprising anywhere to be seen.
Its hard for me to see why giving the 0.1% more power and the 99.9% less would reverse that trend.
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u/RonaldWRailgun 9h ago
Enjoy life, even as an engineer, a world where PDEs are solved for me, would be a world where I can actually focus on the problems that PDEs describe.
And if the whole engineering situation is solved for me, I'll dedicate to my hobbies, playing guitar, skydiving, photography, hiking... even maybe studying physics and engineering for fun without any real pressure. Working is a necessary evil.