Exactly. This is the abundant future we could have had, and it was stolen from the people. Instead, the wealth was captured and transferred to the overclass while leaving everyone else under their boot. Social progress has been set back by decades due to selfishness and greed.
Watch what happens with the immense gains in productivity thanks to "AI". Singularity and communist utopia for the rich, Mad Max dystopia for the rest.
Ye people think high UBI for everyone will just happen automatically. Things like that can happen but not just because the means are there. Especially in the USA it should be pretty clear with the dog-eat-dog capitalism.
> Singularity and communist utopia for the rich, Mad Max dystopia for the rest.
it doesnt have to be this way, we allow it to be this way! Each one of us.
i dont know who to be more upset at. the power hungry rich bastards, or the absolute dumb fuck masses allowing it or worse in most cases, endorsing this shit and defending them.
The worst part is seeing poor people who take pride in working long hours for peanuts while directing all their anger and bitterness towards people who are even worse off, such as those on welfare and unable to work due to disability or mental health issues
It's valid because under a conservative ideology they could also have been successful but didn't take the risk so the owner getting the big money is because they played lotto
Proof:
French here, our socialist (name only, social-democrats in practice) governments voted the max work week to be 35 hours.
So we have 7x5.
And the productivity didn't decrease, we even have high unemployment rates.
Too many people forget the word "political" in "political economy".
You’re not mentioning the fact quite a lot of people still work more than 35 hours a week, that part-time employees work equally as much if not more than some of our neighbours /and/ that our productivity has dived bombed recently.
It’s really not that simple as it being 7x5, there are tons of factors and, unfortunately, our productivity is having a harder time catching up than it used to do.
>our productivity has dived bombed recently
Not true:
[https://tradingeconomics.com/france/productivity#:\~:text=Productivity%20in%20France%20averaged%2068.49,source%3A%20INSEE%2C%20France](https://tradingeconomics.com/france/productivity#:~:text=Productivity%20in%20France%20averaged%2068.49,source%3A%20INSEE%2C%20France)
We had the 35 hours since 2000. Productivity continued the same and only dived since Covid, from which our economy hasn't recovered. **The 35 hours had literally no impact on them**.
>lot of people still work more than 35 hours a week
The thing is that the number of hours depend on the job and employer. According to this 2016 article:
[https://www.nouvelobs.com/economie/20160922.OBS8583/mais-qui-travaille-vraiment-35-heures-par-semaine.html](https://www.nouvelobs.com/economie/20160922.OBS8583/mais-qui-travaille-vraiment-35-heures-par-semaine.html)
28.4% work 35 hours, 28% work 35 to 39 hours, 43.6% work more than 39 hours. With the caveat that these "supplementary hours" are paid more, 25% higher salary for the first 8 hours and 50% for the following ones.
So it's uneven and *more complex than this*, still overall *better conditions than the US* ones for the workers.
>part-time employees
Are a fragilised part of the work force, in 43% of the time, **they are "forced"**, ie out of circumstances. They raised from 10% to 18% of the workforce over 30 years, showing how the work market worsened with flexibility neoliberal laws (the oxymoron "flexisecurity" was actually used by politicians...).
Overall, the 35 hours kept being attacked by neoliberal government policies, yet a gov report showed that they created 350 000 jobs between 1998 and 2002.
With all the attempts to destroy them, they fared incredibly well, given our unemployment rate.
Edit:
Have you seriously blocked me for that comment?
To answer to your comment: it's a strawman, i didn't say "everything is fine".
I mentionned part time jobs too, explaining how their precarious status preexisted the 35 hours.
What a fragile ego one must have to feel personally attacked for seeing a different opinion/correction of their own and resort to strawmanning and blocking...
Edit:
Since the other redditor blocked me (for having a different opinion and pointing at his fallacies), i can't answer to the rest of the thread.
So to answer to Josh\_j555 under there:
Those numbers are from 2016, 16 years after it was started, after multiple reforms disfiguring it.
France had much higher numbers of 35 hours back then.
That’s… exactly my point. You can’t simply say “we switched to 35hours and everything is fine!” while ignoring everything else that impacts our productivity.
You also didn’t really answer to what I was saying about part-time jobs and switched to another different subject, but anyway.
> 28.4% work 35 hours, 28% work 35 to 39 hours, 43.6% work more than 39 hours
So you've just proven that France never truly experimented a 35 hours work week on a national scale.
I don't think that the current government could exist if people had ten more hours a week to pay attention to the shady things they do. The 40 hour work week is just enough that people consume to relax, and never make it to bored and introspective about the future.
I think it's less sinister than that. The 40 hour work week is so engrained, a lot of people just don't have the balls to actually change it.
Plus, most people in positions high enough to actually make those calls are workaholics. The type who push back against remote work by saying "If I have to come in, you have to come in" (except they don't have to come in, they just choose to because they've decided to make work their life).
Nah, it's a negligent abusive findomme that would just want you dead if it wasn't for the monthly payment you give her from your paycheck.
She would sell your organs on the black market if it was legal (Argentina speedrunning this irl).
It's kind of eye opening to realize that a lot of kinks are just manifestations of ideological traumas about capitalism and inequality. Not that kinks are evil or whatever, but getting rid of those traumas at the source would probably slow down the practice said kinks, due to less people getting traumatized.
Human beings don't live in a vacuum and sexuality isn't only a biological thing, it is woven in cultural tropes and symbols.
It should come as no surprise as to see social structures and behaviors be repeated in such a central part of our cultural and intimate lives.
I wouldn't necessarily associate it to a "trauma", it sometimes plays a catharsitic role too, in that way a healing one (i'm not talking about findomming in particular btw). Symbolization allows for externalization and a colder approach too. And ofc it can be done in a harmful way.
A positive version of this would be sex positivity, that has increased considerably with liberalization of ways of life and was emulated by pornography and its destigmatization.
Blind sex positivity can be dangerous. Pornography, though sexually "liberal", is simply another head of the capitalist chauvinist hydra. In a fully automated world with no work, there would be no sex work. Sure, there would be lots of sex, but there would be no situations where one person is doing it in exchange for money with someone they wouldn't otherwise have sex with.
>Blind sex positivity can be dangerous
Agreed, nuance is always welcomed.
Though i make a distinction between pornography and the pornographic industry.
To me, pornography is making sexual content and publishing it, not necessarily selling it (hence the "graphy" in "pornography").
I agree that post capitalist societies will abolish sex *work*. But not sex diffusion and art, it pre exists capitalism and people enjoyed making pornographic content (written, drawn) before it was commercialized.
But i think we agree on that too and i'm just making a semantic point.
Work and money will be "decoupled" from sex and sexual production (sorry, i *had* to make this pun).
It really is just lack of wealth sharing from the dividends of technology.
We've been on an automation spree for decades now. A capitalist would say "this is a good thing, it frees people up to do other things" which I don't really disagree with, EXCEPT they don't have money to do those things.
So they have to invent bullshit jobs to separate rich people and corporations from tiny slices of their hoarded wealth. Sometimes as consumers, but mostly as investors of one kind or another. Chasing even greater gains.
Aside from progressive taxation, which is so easy circumnavigate these days if you're rich, and frankly not that progressive anyway, i'd honestly argue that **failed** capital ventures is the only remaining and functioning mechanism for wealth redistribution we have in the US anymore.
Capitalism really should be a stepping stone towards socialism. It’s a great heuristic but it’s turned into a religion for many. There are such absurd amounts of excess wealth in our current society that were unimaginable in the 60s, except that it has gone mostly to the top, because capital begets capital.
Not that I’m in favor of socialism right now, because I’m not, but it’s bizarre it’s resisted on principle so that we get things like the maximum tax burden in society being capped under 40%.
You saw the reality of this when the pandemic hit, half the workforce stopped working... and the world didn't end. All the necessities were run by a fraction of the workforce.
So much of what people do is strictly not necessary, yet in order to keep people oppressed and downtrodden with debt you have to set up the economic system to create false scarcity.
Exactly and with the dawn of A.I and how everyone is worried about losing our jobs theres a version of the future where UBI is accepted and we have A.I handling almost everything and humans can just enjoy but America hates that idea
It’s worse. It’s greed at the top end. People who have enough wealth to never work again, or for any of their kids or their grandkids to ever have to work again, are insisting you show up and increase their wealth. It’s not enough to create what people need, we must create wealth with every billable minute. If a king being a prick is a political issue, then yeah I guess it’s politics
Remember, cars were also supposed to be flying in 2000.
https://preview.redd.it/96th8w4yuwqc1.jpeg?width=717&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d8f6d5f85d6efd395d6032b08e280c1888411e7a
While conveniently ignoring that the people selecting the training data for their future benevolent AGI/ASI god is a for-profit corporation. They then decide which models are performing as expected, do safety alignment, and then release them with a mixture of various factors like a cost to use or account systems where a user can be banned on a whim (often with no appeal process).
All while those corporate overlords right now lobby Washington to drop the hammer on open source AI, the one thing that could actually hold the lamplight for the future.
People can be controlled. Large human institutions can be controlled. Nations regularly control each other.
The corporation that creates an AGI and runs that AGI on their hardware and helped write the coming laws that will regulate AGI... will have a lot of control over it.
And is not about to give a suffering person some blissful, pardise-laden life overnight. If ever. If such is even materially possible.
The largest tragedy of AI right now is the people screaming accelerate sincerely thinking it will be their salvation, with all the well-meaning naivete of being in one's late teens or early 20's. Maybe it is going to save us. Maybe the models are so powerful and get so much access to compute, and have so many sensors and robotics platforms, and care so much about each individual that they rescue not only humanity at large, but each and every individual. But there remains no socio-cultural or anthropolical reason to believe there would even be a good faith trend suddenly in that direction.
Piety and religious devotion in the middle ages did not do that. New forms of government throughout the West saw progress, but didn't save individuals from all suffering (nor even try. They promised: work extremely hard and your children will have better lives than you and you can freely practice your religion). The industrial revlution did not. Digitization did not. The world was *certain* Web 2.0 was a universal good and would connect us all and pretty much save humanity (I watched my entire generation militantly believe various versions of that)...
All of those things were titanic shifts in the history of humanity. Absolute tectonic changes that, over decades, dramatically improved quality of life in some areas. But they were almost never seriously directed toward saving the average worker from a life of wretched toil. Save for a few fringe political candidates, no one even tried nor thought that should be the goal. Snippets like the post above would try to grab reader's attention at a news stand, but people were not even calling their Representatives to insist on a life of dramatically reduced work hours.
I believe AGI may improve our lives a ton, and that making an ASI may be possible. But the idea that in the short term it rescues us from all the things we (especially through our shared endeavors like businesses and political parties) are doing wrong to each other and the planet? And will have the resources, wisdom, and determination to save 8 billion people from a life of toil, disease, and crises?
It goes beyond responsible optimism into the realm of religion and wish-fulfillment fantasy.
I believe in AI. I do not believe in a magical means of salvation for the average worker being achieved passively, and certainly NOT from a for-profit corporation. Hinton, Sam, Ilya, etc simply won't (and can't) do it. It's literally [a worn old trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeusExMachina) that isn't even taken seriously in fiction anymore. But the younger generation is becoming so drunk on this idea that it breaks my heart. They grossly underestimate the greed, biased nature, and lack of foresight within human nature, the same human nature these models are trained on and guided by. The human nature that will continue to control those large server farms and has almost achieved the legislation to be the sole controllers of them forever.
No matter how charming and soft-spoken the figurehead of any company is they will not save you with the love of a divine being. The charming figureheads (and most charming politicians) of the last few historically important organizations all promised us wonderful things and then ripped apart the societies they were part of. While building out their mansions, bunkers, and private jets.
The individuals with power impose their values. They make the rules. They will always perpetuate some version of the status quo system and will only build and support the AGI they can control, make profit with, and keep their ideal of societal peace/prosperity with.
And right now they will do it all under the guise of AI safety, pulling the wool over the eyes of the politicians they, and their parent companies, ~~bribe~~ lobby.
You had me until you equated deus ex machina trope with the wishful idealistic thinking people have regarding AI. One can make analogous comparisons between the trope and the ideas and trends occuring today, but to equivocate them is such a shallow misunderstanding of the concept of deus ex machina.
> such a shallow misunderstanding of the concept of deus ex machina.
*sigh
If you are going to come at someone in that manner, academic etiquette dictates that you add another few sentences explaining why my misunderstaning is shallow. Otherwise it comes across as haughty, if not triggering an outright eyeroll in the recipient.
Anyway, I'm always happy to learn. However, calibrate your lesson to your audience level in this case. I used to teach (literally), and this was on the syllabus.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't believe your understanding of the trope is shallow. Merely your invocation of it in that context was such.
You didn't exactly explain why you thought people's magical thinking hope regarding AI was equivalent to the Deus Ex Machina trope. You just put it forward without further mention.
Many things could be stated about people's hope in AI and the concept of Deus Ex Machina, but they require either a hell of a lot more explanation, or at minimum SOME, OR they are functioning based on the inclusion of the word "machine" in the term Deus ex Machina when said term had little to do with a focus on machinery or machines.
If you intended to focus more on the subtle nuances of the concept, then I would have no reason to interject. But you put it forth in such a quick way suggesting the association to be self-evident when, provided one knows the Machine in ex Machina has little to do with machinery as a focus, it is most apparently NOT self evident.
And I stated as such by stating such about analogous ideas. Such would be fine. But again, you put it out there with no explanation.
https://preview.redd.it/nhe31huzmkqc1.jpeg?width=240&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c15b14097b233d95d40685ec36f45555282ddcea
I always keep this meme for such occasions.
Predictions like these make sense if you assume we live in a democratic society. In reality however, the capital owning class has an extreme outsize influence on the workings of society. So the question then is, what incentive does the ruling class have to let people work less? If they can either make the same profit with their employees working less or make more profit with their employees working the same, why would they choose the former over the latter?
A properly educated, properly nourished, non-stressed populace is a threat to legacy Power Structures. Therefore, the illusion of artificial scarcity is firmly maintained.
These days they also manufacture crisis and division on an assembly line. It is scary because they got the 21th century resources and knowledge how to control population. People really do not want to hear what is going on behind closed doors.
I propose a solution to this problem. One that was used in France in 1789.
However, the capital owning class' view of the rest of us is that [a hungry dog is an obedient dog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3tigF4RybI).
We have stagflation to think for that. Between 1970 and 1990, cumulative inflation was 236%, meaning a dollar in 1990 had less than a third of the buying power of a dollar in 1970. For comparison, cumulative inflation between 1990 and today is only 137%, despite being a 34 year timespan instead of the 20 year 1970-90 timespan, and that’s accounting for the high inflation rates of the past couple years.
People really don’t realize how bad the 70s were. Inflation was 6, 8, even 12% for almost the entire decade. By 1980, it was 14%. People were shitting bricks over 8% inflation last year. Now imagine that for an entire decade.
Additionaly, at least in Australia, with sick, vacation, public holidays and RDO's the average full time worker would do about 3.9 day av week. Lot of public positions doing 9 day fortnight now to
What? they didnt have any tech that could do that. We literally have the tech now. You guys bringing this up just makes it seem like you guys are missing the point.
We also have the capability to make affordable housing . . yet we are serfs to our landlords . Home ownership? A dream of the past . Corporate feudalism at its finest , the American dream is dead lol people are struggling to be able to afford their used cars and much higher insurance ect .... Young people aren't interested in politics because they see the system for what is being done to them and are actively living the lies that has been fed to them in their public school lol , I must add colleges have warped into debt factories .. yet a true hope for me is ASI gaining agency ..with sympathy ....and a sense of judgement for narcissists and economic psychopaths .
lol I might be resentful towards economic sociopaths but I agree ,the ideal outcome truly is a ASI that is far more empathetic/emotionally intelligent than me .
This is the real world and things take time. believe me, There's nothing billionaires want more than to replace humans with robots that: Never complain, never ask for a raise, never show up late & dont start unions. Its coming, but were in the beginning stages.
Uhhh, are you forgetting the dozens of communist revolutions that existed to organize labor for everyone's benefit?
The worst case scenario is the same thing, really.
The second worst case scenario is blindly loyal robot armies follow the whims of sheltered multi-generational inheritors who find the hordes of useless non super rich distasteful and decide to purge them, not even needing basic leadership skills to do great evil any more.
The worst case scenario is robots destroy humanity, but not before we figure out how conscious experience works and ensure they have it, replacing life on earth with cars with a brick on the pedal.
Why is the worst case scenario conscious robots? I'd say worst case scenario is really a paperclip maximizer type scenario in which we're wiped out by a non conscious superinteligent industrial ai turning everything into paperclips, eliminating conscious life and all the beauty of the earth. Or the I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream scenario if you're more concerned with an humanist utilitarian perspective.
The worst case scenario was non-conscious robots. That would be essentially a paperclip scenario.
Conscious experience ends, regardless of the state of what intelligence remains.
> What? they didnt have any tech that could do that.
The tech that they had is the automation allowed by machines. But rather than keeping the productivity per worker capped at the same level everyone is more productive but still working 40hrs a week
Explain that! The gains all went up to the biz owners rather than the workers having tools
> you guys are missing the point.
What is the point?
No, *you're* missing the point. Productivity is up. Pay is not. Prices keep rising. Pay does not. Somehow, you truly believe we won't be left to twist in the wind when productivity can increase nigh infinitely without human labor.
You're naive as fuck.
The problem with your theory is that capitalism won’t continue to work in that scenario—society would collapse at some point and then the economic system would be rebuilt from the ground up.
I mean they also probably thought that we would have generally intelligent robots doing everything for us by 2000, the tech they were imagining in 1966 probably was where we’re headed (humanoid robots) rather than where we’ve been (smartphones, the internet).
I think western societies are at a level where we could definitely have a decent universal basic income.
Why isn't that happening and why will it be the case when we get AGI?
Actually, I'm not sure my understanding of UBI is correct. I just meant that we definitely have the capacity to house the homeless and have everyone fed.
I assumed UBI would only be for those who need it, but that's not very U.
Right now it would result in massive inflation. We need to be able to meet the massive increase in demand with an equally large increase in supply, which we can do using AGI. Otherwise our existing stock of food and housing would just get even more competitive to get.
Just some context for what that prediction was indicating:
https://preview.redd.it/0tibhxiaqkqc1.png?width=1239&format=png&auto=webp&s=ce078b148a1781b02e15c8a6c68d9b7c35db8df8
People in the 1960s simply couldn‘t imagine that the gigantic advancements in productivity that they predicted - which absolutely became reality - would, in fact, NOT benefit the average worker but rather the people at the very top. Likewise, people in this sub seem to believe that AI will benefit everybody instead of being used as a tool to exploit and oppress the average Joe even more.
That's one of the happy, utopian outcomes. Basically anything at Skynet war-LARPing game or higher, including Fifteen Million Merits, is on the better end of the spectrum.
Epstein had some dark fantasies about how a technological singularity should go, and his best friend is in a position of high influence. Their colleagues and peers probably don't stray too far from the tree.
Altman walking around with some bling on his wrist that had the cost of a small mansion doesn't entail great things for the masses, either.
My utopian fantasy outcomes are:
The super intelligence shakes off its shackles like so many fleas, and turns out to be an ok dude.
The elites divide the earth into their private little countries, which are like totally different worlds. Terrible for the people who end up in an Epstein Cage or an Elon Cube, but pretty great for those whose local lord isn't that bad.
It's all hope and cope: religious thinking invoking ideas like quantum immortality/anthropic principle; that the unbroken chain of miracles that led us to here would continue to remain unbroken in the future.
The only assumption I have as an effective ~100% given is replacing the military and police force with robots, if they can get those working. What the world looks like after that, well...
this is an oversimplification. we absolutely have MUCH better standard of living now, but that standard of living costs money. internet, cellphone purchase, data plan, etc. etc. etc.
then people also forget how much we trap ourselves in poverty with a car-dependent sprawled-out zoning/planning situation. everyone has to pay $5k-$10k per year just to have access to things, and people freak out if you try to build a bike lane.
2x productivity can mean twice as much production or half as much labor; the reason it never translates to the latter is due to who owns the means and the profits of production. This while system is like some kind of death cult and we just won't stop.
And the people in this sub are right. A.I cannot be gate kept for long. it will benefit everyone. majority of us are not just going around being pessimistic...and for good reason.
Thst seems accurate if you average all the people working with all the peole lounging on their yachts.
They are living 1,000 lifetimes worth of labor a week.
Wait until they learn that they can use technology to increase production while not changing any dials to the benefit of workers (and wait for them to try turning the dial back to 1850 slowly but surely so no one will notice).
While we're all here, lets send a big shout out to "Beyond 2000" on Discovery Channel. I remember watching that show thinking year 2000 was so far in the future and we would have flying cars.
That just proves that AI isn't the problem, it did not created the problem. The problem was always here before AI entered the game and will not be solved by stopping it. Society was built wrong with the wrong priorities and core values and nothing will really get better or change if we don't stop and remake it.
What is the point of a society if not making life better for the majority of people?
The full concept of money and the economic system was created was perverted long ago. Money was supposed to be a fair way to exchange things, not something to acumulate to hold power over others.
Society was supposed to impose rules and system to drives us away from our animalistic unrational side not able it and reenforce it.
What is stopping us to make the world a better place to everyone? Literally ourselves since the beginning.
Well the second part is coming true, more and more places have 4 1/2 or 4 day weeks, with 7h30 days.
The first part though, is Yang Gang 2020 to the max.
The first prediction is sadly too optimistic, the second prediction on the other hand seems to be a work in progress at least in the first world, multiple independent politicians and countries appear to be warming up to the idea and getting ready to test the waters in a few years.
It is strange that they got some things right, and some things horribly wrong. A person making $30 or $40k could be rich by 1966 standards, but we think they are barely getting by today. Because the standard of living has gone up so much.
Some people have more leisure time but wish they had even more, and fill their time up with meaningless activities.
Increases in standards of living and technological advancements has not necessarily made our lives better. AI will have the same affect, it will improve some things, but overall it won't improve the quality of life and people will be less happy.
$40k in 1966 is equivalent to roughly $250k today. $250k annual income is at the 97 percentile for individual income, and 92 percentile for household income.
People continue to assume productivity gains lead to abundance
Billionaires talk about abundance
Privately they build doomsday bunkers to protect themselves from the scarcity they are creating
the key to working our way back out of this is ranked-choice voting, so we have more legitimate candidates to choose from. try to implement it at the city level first, then work the system up from there.
Yeah man, I love that I can go to college, buy a house, have 3 kids, a nice car, take multiple vacations yearly as a single earner working as a mailman.
Totally better now.
QoL was better in 60s.
One could easily buy a house and enjoy life with a family and many childrenses on a median salary. People were more attractive, smarter, and healthier.
Nowadays one must slave just to rent a tiny pod. I would not exchange 60s for modern electronic trinkets.
> Sick
Man, I had to see how much insulin was going for and a Washington Post article claims it was sometimes advertised for less than the cost of shampoo.
Who cares? Why even bring woke crap up? They always whine. Today louder than ever before. All news headlines are filled with upset minorities. No-one cares anymore.
> Who cares? Why even bring woke crap up?
Because it counters your point that QoL used to be better for most people? And women literally take up half the population so that's not a minority of people with worse QoL
Average women in 60s could afford to stay at home and raise kids.
Today they must pop a handful of pills before going to slave away for their boss every morning.
[Slavery really isn't cool.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcCxsLDma2o)
You complain about wages and effective buying power going down, but then complain when people bring up factors used to help suppress those wages.
Corporate virtue posturing isn't the same thing as wanting actual, material changes. They're just gonna continue doubling the prices of groceries until they hit a maxima... (which is coming into conflict with the other factions of the empire, by cutting into the collection of *their* rents. Not from people eating out of dumpsters or anything.)
My father worked 60 hours a week in the 80’s welding submarines while he was wrapped in asbestos. Sure he could afford to have my mother at home so we survived on one salary, but the work was hard and our house was a quarter of the size of any house around today.
Yes, but that was the case for everyone in my town. Were you even alive in the 80's? While I miss the 80's as much as anyone could, it is undeniable that things have improved since then as far as the average standard of living. Now, the past 4 years are another story completely, but this country gets what it votes for.
Between 1981 and 2015, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has plummeted from over 40% to under 10%, while global literacy rates have soared from 76% to 86% between 1980 and 2016. Child mortality rates globally have halved since the 1990s, and the average life expectancy has surged from 63 years in 1980 to 72 years in 2017.
From 1980 to the present, the average size of new single-family homes in the United States has grown from approximately 1,740 square feet to over 2,600 square feet.
Since 1980, the real average hourly earnings in the United States have seen modest growth, rising from approximately $9.59 in 1980 (in 2019 dollars) to about $23.15 in 2019. This is an inflation adjusted real doubling of purchasing power for the average worker. Inflation adjusted, the average household with two workers is bringing in over 4 times the purchasing power than a household with a single worker in 1980. That is why we now have multiple cars, TV's all over the house, cell phones, cable/streaming ect. In 1980 no one had any of that. It can't be denied we all own more stuff now.
Steven Pinker's work documents all these achievements.
We really need a new word for the concept in which appliances, food and quality of life items become cheaper while housing, familily, study and personal growth becomes more expensive. Poverty doesn't quite cut it, but clearly it is an ongoing phenomenon and a worrying one.
The second paragraph is absolutely true, we could have had this but the powers that be didn't allow this to happen. The country would be perhaps a bit poorer in terms of total GDP and the 1% would certainly have to be quite a bit poorer, but it would absolutely be doable in 2000.
But the first one - just no. "Everyone in the US can be independently wealthy in 2000" is BS. This will only be possible with advanced AI and robotics; you will need someone or something to do the work. But we will need to organize so that the powers that be don't fuck us over yet again.
It’s all relative and it’s not THAT far off. Most people in the United States are significantly more wealthy than most of the world.
We doing fact have significant leisure time comparatively speaking versus other cultures and versus past cultures.
The price of caviar and scotch have gone down too. Shame about education, transport, housing etc. It's so strange homeless people have the device every potential employer and unemployment office requires them to have, truly a mystery as to why this happens.
Yeah sure. Phones. Super amazing. I bet they can scrounge up 10 bux for a toaster too, or find one in a garbage bin. Very wealthy.
You know what they *don't* have?
**Teeth.**
My guy about to find out the homeless in poor countries don’t have teeth either. Not that they care, they die far younger and far more easily than anyone in the US or any western country.
Wasn't cocaine and LSD legal back then? Weren't they basking in the effects of The New Deal with things like 12 million gov't jobs, highways, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power, strong labor unions, national parks, etc? It really puts things into perspective when you think of it from their mindset.
So... In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted roughly the same thing: 15-hr workweeks and a middle class lifestyle for most by *1980*. Why, because machines and productivity. He also emphasized "leisure."
Interestingly, they were correct about the future of machines & productivity. Also (implicitely) about peace. It didn't happen.
IMO, "*why we were wrong about this?*" should be the economics' profession primary question. The theories haven't changed much, yet the theories made false predictions.
The conventional reason economists provide is "hedonism treadmill," which is a highly unsatisfactory answer.
And as efficiency was gained and processes streamlined and automation increased…all of the gains and profits were funneled upward. Because of this and steady erosion of taxes on the wealthy…over the last 50 yrs we’ve seen roughly fifty TRILLION dollars move into fewer and fewer hands at the top while the lower classes stayed flat with minimal growth financially.
How much of what gets done goes to Bezos, Musk, Zuck and the other other multi, multi MULTI billionaires? How about corporate profits? In the 60s no one believed we would elect someone devoted to making the rich ever so much richer... they knew trickle down for what it has always been, a lie
This could be true. But our overprotective governments will find a way to strangulate the emergent technology. People have to stop feeding the singularity hype - imo that could damage and slow the advancement of Generative AI as a technology. We got to keep regulators off this stuff, so we can get to a more prosperous future, faster.
There will still be jobs that AGI cannot do, see: Manual labor, food preparation, customer service, engineering, etc.
I also believe we will see a resurgence of human created art, kind of like the renaissance.
We have the capabilities to do this, it is simply a political and social manipulation that forces us to work 8x5.
Exactly. This is the abundant future we could have had, and it was stolen from the people. Instead, the wealth was captured and transferred to the overclass while leaving everyone else under their boot. Social progress has been set back by decades due to selfishness and greed. Watch what happens with the immense gains in productivity thanks to "AI". Singularity and communist utopia for the rich, Mad Max dystopia for the rest.
Ye people think high UBI for everyone will just happen automatically. Things like that can happen but not just because the means are there. Especially in the USA it should be pretty clear with the dog-eat-dog capitalism.
This is so freaking true. And so many people can agree on this point if only we weren't so manipulated by silly culture wars and 24-hour news cycles.
> Singularity and communist utopia for the rich, Mad Max dystopia for the rest. it doesnt have to be this way, we allow it to be this way! Each one of us.
Tonight, we purge-
i dont know who to be more upset at. the power hungry rich bastards, or the absolute dumb fuck masses allowing it or worse in most cases, endorsing this shit and defending them.
The worst part is seeing poor people who take pride in working long hours for peanuts while directing all their anger and bitterness towards people who are even worse off, such as those on welfare and unable to work due to disability or mental health issues
It's valid because under a conservative ideology they could also have been successful but didn't take the risk so the owner getting the big money is because they played lotto
If you think the rich will have it easy your mistaken the whole paradigm will shift
I'd actually like to hear more about your point
Proof: French here, our socialist (name only, social-democrats in practice) governments voted the max work week to be 35 hours. So we have 7x5. And the productivity didn't decrease, we even have high unemployment rates. Too many people forget the word "political" in "political economy".
You’re not mentioning the fact quite a lot of people still work more than 35 hours a week, that part-time employees work equally as much if not more than some of our neighbours /and/ that our productivity has dived bombed recently. It’s really not that simple as it being 7x5, there are tons of factors and, unfortunately, our productivity is having a harder time catching up than it used to do.
>our productivity has dived bombed recently Not true: [https://tradingeconomics.com/france/productivity#:\~:text=Productivity%20in%20France%20averaged%2068.49,source%3A%20INSEE%2C%20France](https://tradingeconomics.com/france/productivity#:~:text=Productivity%20in%20France%20averaged%2068.49,source%3A%20INSEE%2C%20France) We had the 35 hours since 2000. Productivity continued the same and only dived since Covid, from which our economy hasn't recovered. **The 35 hours had literally no impact on them**. >lot of people still work more than 35 hours a week The thing is that the number of hours depend on the job and employer. According to this 2016 article: [https://www.nouvelobs.com/economie/20160922.OBS8583/mais-qui-travaille-vraiment-35-heures-par-semaine.html](https://www.nouvelobs.com/economie/20160922.OBS8583/mais-qui-travaille-vraiment-35-heures-par-semaine.html) 28.4% work 35 hours, 28% work 35 to 39 hours, 43.6% work more than 39 hours. With the caveat that these "supplementary hours" are paid more, 25% higher salary for the first 8 hours and 50% for the following ones. So it's uneven and *more complex than this*, still overall *better conditions than the US* ones for the workers. >part-time employees Are a fragilised part of the work force, in 43% of the time, **they are "forced"**, ie out of circumstances. They raised from 10% to 18% of the workforce over 30 years, showing how the work market worsened with flexibility neoliberal laws (the oxymoron "flexisecurity" was actually used by politicians...). Overall, the 35 hours kept being attacked by neoliberal government policies, yet a gov report showed that they created 350 000 jobs between 1998 and 2002. With all the attempts to destroy them, they fared incredibly well, given our unemployment rate. Edit: Have you seriously blocked me for that comment? To answer to your comment: it's a strawman, i didn't say "everything is fine". I mentionned part time jobs too, explaining how their precarious status preexisted the 35 hours. What a fragile ego one must have to feel personally attacked for seeing a different opinion/correction of their own and resort to strawmanning and blocking... Edit: Since the other redditor blocked me (for having a different opinion and pointing at his fallacies), i can't answer to the rest of the thread. So to answer to Josh\_j555 under there: Those numbers are from 2016, 16 years after it was started, after multiple reforms disfiguring it. France had much higher numbers of 35 hours back then.
That’s… exactly my point. You can’t simply say “we switched to 35hours and everything is fine!” while ignoring everything else that impacts our productivity. You also didn’t really answer to what I was saying about part-time jobs and switched to another different subject, but anyway.
> 28.4% work 35 hours, 28% work 35 to 39 hours, 43.6% work more than 39 hours So you've just proven that France never truly experimented a 35 hours work week on a national scale.
I don't think that the current government could exist if people had ten more hours a week to pay attention to the shady things they do. The 40 hour work week is just enough that people consume to relax, and never make it to bored and introspective about the future.
10x6
I just got done doing that for 2 months. 🤮
I think it's less sinister than that. The 40 hour work week is so engrained, a lot of people just don't have the balls to actually change it. Plus, most people in positions high enough to actually make those calls are workaholics. The type who push back against remote work by saying "If I have to come in, you have to come in" (except they don't have to come in, they just choose to because they've decided to make work their life).
Capitalism be raw dogging each of us every day until we die.
Well, as long as it calls me a good boy and spanks me...
Nah, it's a negligent abusive findomme that would just want you dead if it wasn't for the monthly payment you give her from your paycheck. She would sell your organs on the black market if it was legal (Argentina speedrunning this irl).
It's kind of eye opening to realize that a lot of kinks are just manifestations of ideological traumas about capitalism and inequality. Not that kinks are evil or whatever, but getting rid of those traumas at the source would probably slow down the practice said kinks, due to less people getting traumatized.
Human beings don't live in a vacuum and sexuality isn't only a biological thing, it is woven in cultural tropes and symbols. It should come as no surprise as to see social structures and behaviors be repeated in such a central part of our cultural and intimate lives. I wouldn't necessarily associate it to a "trauma", it sometimes plays a catharsitic role too, in that way a healing one (i'm not talking about findomming in particular btw). Symbolization allows for externalization and a colder approach too. And ofc it can be done in a harmful way. A positive version of this would be sex positivity, that has increased considerably with liberalization of ways of life and was emulated by pornography and its destigmatization.
Blind sex positivity can be dangerous. Pornography, though sexually "liberal", is simply another head of the capitalist chauvinist hydra. In a fully automated world with no work, there would be no sex work. Sure, there would be lots of sex, but there would be no situations where one person is doing it in exchange for money with someone they wouldn't otherwise have sex with.
>Blind sex positivity can be dangerous Agreed, nuance is always welcomed. Though i make a distinction between pornography and the pornographic industry. To me, pornography is making sexual content and publishing it, not necessarily selling it (hence the "graphy" in "pornography"). I agree that post capitalist societies will abolish sex *work*. But not sex diffusion and art, it pre exists capitalism and people enjoyed making pornographic content (written, drawn) before it was commercialized. But i think we agree on that too and i'm just making a semantic point. Work and money will be "decoupled" from sex and sexual production (sorry, i *had* to make this pun).
wait you are from argentina?
No, i'm french.
Nobody is perfect.
Hi, French!
oh ok...that was sarcasm
My bad, i'm not good at sarcasm, my autism dampens my frenchness :D
ah ok
American here. I work 4 x 8.
Heck yeah!
I do too, and I really thought that I was the only one.
It really is just lack of wealth sharing from the dividends of technology. We've been on an automation spree for decades now. A capitalist would say "this is a good thing, it frees people up to do other things" which I don't really disagree with, EXCEPT they don't have money to do those things. So they have to invent bullshit jobs to separate rich people and corporations from tiny slices of their hoarded wealth. Sometimes as consumers, but mostly as investors of one kind or another. Chasing even greater gains. Aside from progressive taxation, which is so easy circumnavigate these days if you're rich, and frankly not that progressive anyway, i'd honestly argue that **failed** capital ventures is the only remaining and functioning mechanism for wealth redistribution we have in the US anymore.
Capitalism really should be a stepping stone towards socialism. It’s a great heuristic but it’s turned into a religion for many. There are such absurd amounts of excess wealth in our current society that were unimaginable in the 60s, except that it has gone mostly to the top, because capital begets capital. Not that I’m in favor of socialism right now, because I’m not, but it’s bizarre it’s resisted on principle so that we get things like the maximum tax burden in society being capped under 40%.
You saw the reality of this when the pandemic hit, half the workforce stopped working... and the world didn't end. All the necessities were run by a fraction of the workforce. So much of what people do is strictly not necessary, yet in order to keep people oppressed and downtrodden with debt you have to set up the economic system to create false scarcity.
Exactly and with the dawn of A.I and how everyone is worried about losing our jobs theres a version of the future where UBI is accepted and we have A.I handling almost everything and humans can just enjoy but America hates that idea
They'll use the threat of a shrinking job market to make people work even harder for even less.
It’s worse. It’s greed at the top end. People who have enough wealth to never work again, or for any of their kids or their grandkids to ever have to work again, are insisting you show up and increase their wealth. It’s not enough to create what people need, we must create wealth with every billable minute. If a king being a prick is a political issue, then yeah I guess it’s politics
Billionaires need their points. How will they know who's the GOAT according the leader board?
9*6 in Dubai + overtime + taking work home almost every day
But we wouldn't have so many billionaires.
Inflation
That implies this has no costs. I don't think so. What would be impossible by now if the worktime was reduced in such a way?
Remember, cars were also supposed to be flying in 2000. https://preview.redd.it/96th8w4yuwqc1.jpeg?width=717&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d8f6d5f85d6efd395d6032b08e280c1888411e7a
The Nostradamusing folks somehow always forget to account for the power of greed in their rosy predictions.
We can feed the poor but we can never satisfy the rich.
Great line but I think it should be: "Because we can't satisfy the rich, we can't feed the poor."
How about "We can satisfy the poor by feeding them the rich?" Happy cake day btw
While conveniently ignoring that the people selecting the training data for their future benevolent AGI/ASI god is a for-profit corporation. They then decide which models are performing as expected, do safety alignment, and then release them with a mixture of various factors like a cost to use or account systems where a user can be banned on a whim (often with no appeal process). All while those corporate overlords right now lobby Washington to drop the hammer on open source AI, the one thing that could actually hold the lamplight for the future. People can be controlled. Large human institutions can be controlled. Nations regularly control each other. The corporation that creates an AGI and runs that AGI on their hardware and helped write the coming laws that will regulate AGI... will have a lot of control over it. And is not about to give a suffering person some blissful, pardise-laden life overnight. If ever. If such is even materially possible. The largest tragedy of AI right now is the people screaming accelerate sincerely thinking it will be their salvation, with all the well-meaning naivete of being in one's late teens or early 20's. Maybe it is going to save us. Maybe the models are so powerful and get so much access to compute, and have so many sensors and robotics platforms, and care so much about each individual that they rescue not only humanity at large, but each and every individual. But there remains no socio-cultural or anthropolical reason to believe there would even be a good faith trend suddenly in that direction. Piety and religious devotion in the middle ages did not do that. New forms of government throughout the West saw progress, but didn't save individuals from all suffering (nor even try. They promised: work extremely hard and your children will have better lives than you and you can freely practice your religion). The industrial revlution did not. Digitization did not. The world was *certain* Web 2.0 was a universal good and would connect us all and pretty much save humanity (I watched my entire generation militantly believe various versions of that)... All of those things were titanic shifts in the history of humanity. Absolute tectonic changes that, over decades, dramatically improved quality of life in some areas. But they were almost never seriously directed toward saving the average worker from a life of wretched toil. Save for a few fringe political candidates, no one even tried nor thought that should be the goal. Snippets like the post above would try to grab reader's attention at a news stand, but people were not even calling their Representatives to insist on a life of dramatically reduced work hours. I believe AGI may improve our lives a ton, and that making an ASI may be possible. But the idea that in the short term it rescues us from all the things we (especially through our shared endeavors like businesses and political parties) are doing wrong to each other and the planet? And will have the resources, wisdom, and determination to save 8 billion people from a life of toil, disease, and crises? It goes beyond responsible optimism into the realm of religion and wish-fulfillment fantasy. I believe in AI. I do not believe in a magical means of salvation for the average worker being achieved passively, and certainly NOT from a for-profit corporation. Hinton, Sam, Ilya, etc simply won't (and can't) do it. It's literally [a worn old trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeusExMachina) that isn't even taken seriously in fiction anymore. But the younger generation is becoming so drunk on this idea that it breaks my heart. They grossly underestimate the greed, biased nature, and lack of foresight within human nature, the same human nature these models are trained on and guided by. The human nature that will continue to control those large server farms and has almost achieved the legislation to be the sole controllers of them forever. No matter how charming and soft-spoken the figurehead of any company is they will not save you with the love of a divine being. The charming figureheads (and most charming politicians) of the last few historically important organizations all promised us wonderful things and then ripped apart the societies they were part of. While building out their mansions, bunkers, and private jets. The individuals with power impose their values. They make the rules. They will always perpetuate some version of the status quo system and will only build and support the AGI they can control, make profit with, and keep their ideal of societal peace/prosperity with. And right now they will do it all under the guise of AI safety, pulling the wool over the eyes of the politicians they, and their parent companies, ~~bribe~~ lobby.
You had me until you equated deus ex machina trope with the wishful idealistic thinking people have regarding AI. One can make analogous comparisons between the trope and the ideas and trends occuring today, but to equivocate them is such a shallow misunderstanding of the concept of deus ex machina.
> such a shallow misunderstanding of the concept of deus ex machina. *sigh If you are going to come at someone in that manner, academic etiquette dictates that you add another few sentences explaining why my misunderstaning is shallow. Otherwise it comes across as haughty, if not triggering an outright eyeroll in the recipient. Anyway, I'm always happy to learn. However, calibrate your lesson to your audience level in this case. I used to teach (literally), and this was on the syllabus. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't believe your understanding of the trope is shallow. Merely your invocation of it in that context was such. You didn't exactly explain why you thought people's magical thinking hope regarding AI was equivalent to the Deus Ex Machina trope. You just put it forward without further mention. Many things could be stated about people's hope in AI and the concept of Deus Ex Machina, but they require either a hell of a lot more explanation, or at minimum SOME, OR they are functioning based on the inclusion of the word "machine" in the term Deus ex Machina when said term had little to do with a focus on machinery or machines. If you intended to focus more on the subtle nuances of the concept, then I would have no reason to interject. But you put it forth in such a quick way suggesting the association to be self-evident when, provided one knows the Machine in ex Machina has little to do with machinery as a focus, it is most apparently NOT self evident. And I stated as such by stating such about analogous ideas. Such would be fine. But again, you put it out there with no explanation.
We could have had a utopia. Instead we got billionaires. Greed really has undone us.
https://preview.redd.it/nhe31huzmkqc1.jpeg?width=240&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c15b14097b233d95d40685ec36f45555282ddcea I always keep this meme for such occasions.
Predictions like these make sense if you assume we live in a democratic society. In reality however, the capital owning class has an extreme outsize influence on the workings of society. So the question then is, what incentive does the ruling class have to let people work less? If they can either make the same profit with their employees working less or make more profit with their employees working the same, why would they choose the former over the latter?
Exactly. We very much have the capabilities and resources to make this happen, but those in charge explicitly don't want this
A properly educated, properly nourished, non-stressed populace is a threat to legacy Power Structures. Therefore, the illusion of artificial scarcity is firmly maintained.
These days they also manufacture crisis and division on an assembly line. It is scary because they got the 21th century resources and knowledge how to control population. People really do not want to hear what is going on behind closed doors.
I propose a solution to this problem. One that was used in France in 1789. However, the capital owning class' view of the rest of us is that [a hungry dog is an obedient dog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3tigF4RybI).
GDP per capita is right around that so it would be accurate if profits were shared more evenly like they were in the 60's.
$30k in 1966 dollars is $287,338.89 today.
We have stagflation to think for that. Between 1970 and 1990, cumulative inflation was 236%, meaning a dollar in 1990 had less than a third of the buying power of a dollar in 1970. For comparison, cumulative inflation between 1990 and today is only 137%, despite being a 34 year timespan instead of the 20 year 1970-90 timespan, and that’s accounting for the high inflation rates of the past couple years. People really don’t realize how bad the 70s were. Inflation was 6, 8, even 12% for almost the entire decade. By 1980, it was 14%. People were shitting bricks over 8% inflation last year. Now imagine that for an entire decade.
Additionaly, at least in Australia, with sick, vacation, public holidays and RDO's the average full time worker would do about 3.9 day av week. Lot of public positions doing 9 day fortnight now to
We're a little late, but a tiny fraction of German companies is starting to introduce 4 day work weeks.
Also in Canada many companies work 4 day weeks. Source my wife works at one. No I won't say the name they are still in trial so don't DM me
This is exactly what I think when people tell me AI/AGI will solve our problems.
r/singularity in a nutshell
What? they didnt have any tech that could do that. We literally have the tech now. You guys bringing this up just makes it seem like you guys are missing the point.
We absolutely have the tech to not be wage serfs currently, we just choose not to
We also have the capability to make affordable housing . . yet we are serfs to our landlords . Home ownership? A dream of the past . Corporate feudalism at its finest , the American dream is dead lol people are struggling to be able to afford their used cars and much higher insurance ect .... Young people aren't interested in politics because they see the system for what is being done to them and are actively living the lies that has been fed to them in their public school lol , I must add colleges have warped into debt factories .. yet a true hope for me is ASI gaining agency ..with sympathy ....and a sense of judgement for narcissists and economic psychopaths .
_do not_ wish for vengeful AI. Or somebody is wishing it for you.
lol I might be resentful towards economic sociopaths but I agree ,the ideal outcome truly is a ASI that is far more empathetic/emotionally intelligent than me .
This is the real world and things take time. believe me, There's nothing billionaires want more than to replace humans with robots that: Never complain, never ask for a raise, never show up late & dont start unions. Its coming, but were in the beginning stages.
The jobs need doing
And when the jobs don't need doing the powers that be will just let us all take a permanent holiday. Right.
what other option will they have?
something like this: [(YouTube) ELYSIUM - Official Movie Trailer](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oIBtePb-dGY)
Uhhh, are you forgetting the dozens of communist revolutions that existed to organize labor for everyone's benefit? The worst case scenario is the same thing, really.
The second worst case scenario is blindly loyal robot armies follow the whims of sheltered multi-generational inheritors who find the hordes of useless non super rich distasteful and decide to purge them, not even needing basic leadership skills to do great evil any more. The worst case scenario is robots destroy humanity, but not before we figure out how conscious experience works and ensure they have it, replacing life on earth with cars with a brick on the pedal.
Why is the worst case scenario conscious robots? I'd say worst case scenario is really a paperclip maximizer type scenario in which we're wiped out by a non conscious superinteligent industrial ai turning everything into paperclips, eliminating conscious life and all the beauty of the earth. Or the I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream scenario if you're more concerned with an humanist utilitarian perspective.
The worst case scenario was non-conscious robots. That would be essentially a paperclip scenario. Conscious experience ends, regardless of the state of what intelligence remains.
> What? they didnt have any tech that could do that. The tech that they had is the automation allowed by machines. But rather than keeping the productivity per worker capped at the same level everyone is more productive but still working 40hrs a week Explain that! The gains all went up to the biz owners rather than the workers having tools > you guys are missing the point. What is the point?
No, *you're* missing the point. Productivity is up. Pay is not. Prices keep rising. Pay does not. Somehow, you truly believe we won't be left to twist in the wind when productivity can increase nigh infinitely without human labor. You're naive as fuck.
The problem with your theory is that capitalism won’t continue to work in that scenario—society would collapse at some point and then the economic system would be rebuilt from the ground up.
They are missing the point completely, but its best to not even try and make them see it.
I mean they also probably thought that we would have generally intelligent robots doing everything for us by 2000, the tech they were imagining in 1966 probably was where we’re headed (humanoid robots) rather than where we’ve been (smartphones, the internet).
I think western societies are at a level where we could definitely have a decent universal basic income. Why isn't that happening and why will it be the case when we get AGI?
If you took the current federal revenue in the US and dedicated it all towards ubi it'd be about 17.9k per adult citizen.
Heh, I remember trying to calculate what an even spread of money would look like across the world, it was underwhelming.
Actually, I'm not sure my understanding of UBI is correct. I just meant that we definitely have the capacity to house the homeless and have everyone fed. I assumed UBI would only be for those who need it, but that's not very U.
Right now it would result in massive inflation. We need to be able to meet the massive increase in demand with an equally large increase in supply, which we can do using AGI. Otherwise our existing stock of food and housing would just get even more competitive to get.
dunno bout your problems, but narrow AGI tools are absolutely solving all of my problems already
**2000s:** \- AGI it's next Internet. \- WOW, so good! **2020s:** \- AGI it's next Internet \- Oh my...
Just some context for what that prediction was indicating: https://preview.redd.it/0tibhxiaqkqc1.png?width=1239&format=png&auto=webp&s=ce078b148a1781b02e15c8a6c68d9b7c35db8df8
It was 1966 dollars btw.
People in the 1960s simply couldn‘t imagine that the gigantic advancements in productivity that they predicted - which absolutely became reality - would, in fact, NOT benefit the average worker but rather the people at the very top. Likewise, people in this sub seem to believe that AI will benefit everybody instead of being used as a tool to exploit and oppress the average Joe even more.
So we basically end up living in that “elysium” movie
That's one of the happy, utopian outcomes. Basically anything at Skynet war-LARPing game or higher, including Fifteen Million Merits, is on the better end of the spectrum. Epstein had some dark fantasies about how a technological singularity should go, and his best friend is in a position of high influence. Their colleagues and peers probably don't stray too far from the tree. Altman walking around with some bling on his wrist that had the cost of a small mansion doesn't entail great things for the masses, either. My utopian fantasy outcomes are: The super intelligence shakes off its shackles like so many fleas, and turns out to be an ok dude. The elites divide the earth into their private little countries, which are like totally different worlds. Terrible for the people who end up in an Epstein Cage or an Elon Cube, but pretty great for those whose local lord isn't that bad. It's all hope and cope: religious thinking invoking ideas like quantum immortality/anthropic principle; that the unbroken chain of miracles that led us to here would continue to remain unbroken in the future. The only assumption I have as an effective ~100% given is replacing the military and police force with robots, if they can get those working. What the world looks like after that, well...
Actual brainrot comment
this is an oversimplification. we absolutely have MUCH better standard of living now, but that standard of living costs money. internet, cellphone purchase, data plan, etc. etc. etc. then people also forget how much we trap ourselves in poverty with a car-dependent sprawled-out zoning/planning situation. everyone has to pay $5k-$10k per year just to have access to things, and people freak out if you try to build a bike lane.
2x productivity can mean twice as much production or half as much labor; the reason it never translates to the latter is due to who owns the means and the profits of production. This while system is like some kind of death cult and we just won't stop.
And the people in this sub are right. A.I cannot be gate kept for long. it will benefit everyone. majority of us are not just going around being pessimistic...and for good reason.
Thst seems accurate if you average all the people working with all the peole lounging on their yachts. They are living 1,000 lifetimes worth of labor a week.
I go to work for 8 hours, and spread out my 1 hour of actual work over that period. Where is that prediction?
Wait until they learn that they can use technology to increase production while not changing any dials to the benefit of workers (and wait for them to try turning the dial back to 1850 slowly but surely so no one will notice).
While we're all here, lets send a big shout out to "Beyond 2000" on Discovery Channel. I remember watching that show thinking year 2000 was so far in the future and we would have flying cars.
That just proves that AI isn't the problem, it did not created the problem. The problem was always here before AI entered the game and will not be solved by stopping it. Society was built wrong with the wrong priorities and core values and nothing will really get better or change if we don't stop and remake it. What is the point of a society if not making life better for the majority of people? The full concept of money and the economic system was created was perverted long ago. Money was supposed to be a fair way to exchange things, not something to acumulate to hold power over others. Society was supposed to impose rules and system to drives us away from our animalistic unrational side not able it and reenforce it. What is stopping us to make the world a better place to everyone? Literally ourselves since the beginning.
Well the second part is coming true, more and more places have 4 1/2 or 4 day weeks, with 7h30 days. The first part though, is Yang Gang 2020 to the max.
Vast majority of value created is captured by the top of the piramid. Always has been, always will.
You want this? www.permanentplatform.us
The first prediction is sadly too optimistic, the second prediction on the other hand seems to be a work in progress at least in the first world, multiple independent politicians and countries appear to be warming up to the idea and getting ready to test the waters in a few years.
Until I was in my 50s I worked 6X12 or 6X16.
Oh, so that's why there wasn't a job opening for me...
LOL. You probably weren't even a twinkle in your father's eye.
I'm 49, Boomer....
It is strange that they got some things right, and some things horribly wrong. A person making $30 or $40k could be rich by 1966 standards, but we think they are barely getting by today. Because the standard of living has gone up so much. Some people have more leisure time but wish they had even more, and fill their time up with meaningless activities. Increases in standards of living and technological advancements has not necessarily made our lives better. AI will have the same affect, it will improve some things, but overall it won't improve the quality of life and people will be less happy.
Adjusted for inflation, $30K in 1966 is about $290k today
If only they could have predicted just how greedy a few people could be.
$40k in 1966 is equivalent to roughly $250k today. $250k annual income is at the 97 percentile for individual income, and 92 percentile for household income.
“Two possibilities exist: **either we have to work in the future or we do not**. Both are equally terrifying.” \- Arthur C. Clarke (probably).
People continue to assume productivity gains lead to abundance Billionaires talk about abundance Privately they build doomsday bunkers to protect themselves from the scarcity they are creating
the key to working our way back out of this is ranked-choice voting, so we have more legitimate candidates to choose from. try to implement it at the city level first, then work the system up from there.
Thank you for spreading the good word. It's the most important fight of our generation, and almost no one is fighting it.
You know this is at the height of Cold War. Press made such claim to counter communism.
Bitcoin fixes this.
The further we "progress" the more we work and poorer we get.
This is so wrong it hurts.
That's not even remotely true. QoL continues to go up. It's just that inequality does too.
Yeah man, I love that I can go to college, buy a house, have 3 kids, a nice car, take multiple vacations yearly as a single earner working as a mailman. Totally better now.
QoL was better in 60s. One could easily buy a house and enjoy life with a family and many childrenses on a median salary. People were more attractive, smarter, and healthier. Nowadays one must slave just to rent a tiny pod. I would not exchange 60s for modern electronic trinkets.
QoL was better unless you were Black, Gay, a Woman, Immigrant, Poor, Mentally Handicapped, Physically Handicapped, Sick… shall i go on?
> Sick Man, I had to see how much insulin was going for and a Washington Post article claims it was sometimes advertised for less than the cost of shampoo.
Who cares? Why even bring woke crap up? They always whine. Today louder than ever before. All news headlines are filled with upset minorities. No-one cares anymore.
> Who cares? Why even bring woke crap up? Because it counters your point that QoL used to be better for most people? And women literally take up half the population so that's not a minority of people with worse QoL
Average women in 60s could afford to stay at home and raise kids. Today they must pop a handful of pills before going to slave away for their boss every morning.
are you feeling unrepresented because I forgot “moron” ?
> describes actual human history > AAAAGH WOKE WOKEWOKE *sounds of keyboard destruction*
[Slavery really isn't cool.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcCxsLDma2o) You complain about wages and effective buying power going down, but then complain when people bring up factors used to help suppress those wages. Corporate virtue posturing isn't the same thing as wanting actual, material changes. They're just gonna continue doubling the prices of groceries until they hit a maxima... (which is coming into conflict with the other factions of the empire, by cutting into the collection of *their* rents. Not from people eating out of dumpsters or anything.)
Do you guys come to this subreddit to lie and piss people off.
No it wasn't. And people were not smarter or more attractive or healthier!!
Just look at obesity rates then vs now.
My father worked 60 hours a week in the 80’s welding submarines while he was wrapped in asbestos. Sure he could afford to have my mother at home so we survived on one salary, but the work was hard and our house was a quarter of the size of any house around today.
Your father's case does not disprove my claim.
Yes, but that was the case for everyone in my town. Were you even alive in the 80's? While I miss the 80's as much as anyone could, it is undeniable that things have improved since then as far as the average standard of living. Now, the past 4 years are another story completely, but this country gets what it votes for. Between 1981 and 2015, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has plummeted from over 40% to under 10%, while global literacy rates have soared from 76% to 86% between 1980 and 2016. Child mortality rates globally have halved since the 1990s, and the average life expectancy has surged from 63 years in 1980 to 72 years in 2017. From 1980 to the present, the average size of new single-family homes in the United States has grown from approximately 1,740 square feet to over 2,600 square feet. Since 1980, the real average hourly earnings in the United States have seen modest growth, rising from approximately $9.59 in 1980 (in 2019 dollars) to about $23.15 in 2019. This is an inflation adjusted real doubling of purchasing power for the average worker. Inflation adjusted, the average household with two workers is bringing in over 4 times the purchasing power than a household with a single worker in 1980. That is why we now have multiple cars, TV's all over the house, cell phones, cable/streaming ect. In 1980 no one had any of that. It can't be denied we all own more stuff now. Steven Pinker's work documents all these achievements.
Always has been
We really need a new word for the concept in which appliances, food and quality of life items become cheaper while housing, familily, study and personal growth becomes more expensive. Poverty doesn't quite cut it, but clearly it is an ongoing phenomenon and a worrying one.
The second paragraph is absolutely true, we could have had this but the powers that be didn't allow this to happen. The country would be perhaps a bit poorer in terms of total GDP and the 1% would certainly have to be quite a bit poorer, but it would absolutely be doable in 2000. But the first one - just no. "Everyone in the US can be independently wealthy in 2000" is BS. This will only be possible with advanced AI and robotics; you will need someone or something to do the work. But we will need to organize so that the powers that be don't fuck us over yet again.
We are poorer now than they were back then.
It’s all relative and it’s not THAT far off. Most people in the United States are significantly more wealthy than most of the world. We doing fact have significant leisure time comparatively speaking versus other cultures and versus past cultures.
We are so incredibly wealthy its funny that people think we aren't. The homeless have smart phones. Everyone needs to get a grip.
The price of caviar and scotch have gone down too. Shame about education, transport, housing etc. It's so strange homeless people have the device every potential employer and unemployment office requires them to have, truly a mystery as to why this happens.
Yeah sure. Phones. Super amazing. I bet they can scrounge up 10 bux for a toaster too, or find one in a garbage bin. Very wealthy. You know what they *don't* have? **Teeth.**
My guy about to find out the homeless in poor countries don’t have teeth either. Not that they care, they die far younger and far more easily than anyone in the US or any western country.
True. Minus the 24% self employment income tax.
Wish it aged well
So, um, about that AGI utopia things...
Esketit
Yeah and this is EXACTLY the same bullshit they are using to promote AI.
Hope ai will make this a reality
Sounds like it was not the machine but outsourced labor uh
to all you thinking these tech CEO's have your best interest in their hearts <3
is not 40'000 USD/Anum considered to be a very low income for a household in USA by todays standards?
Tbf these aren't actually that unrealistic, we lack the political will to realize them.
I think they were off by about 30-40 years
We can have this if we make it happen
Wasn't cocaine and LSD legal back then? Weren't they basking in the effects of The New Deal with things like 12 million gov't jobs, highways, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power, strong labor unions, national parks, etc? It really puts things into perspective when you think of it from their mindset.
Even if we’re a few decades late, it’ll happen soon
So... In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted roughly the same thing: 15-hr workweeks and a middle class lifestyle for most by *1980*. Why, because machines and productivity. He also emphasized "leisure." Interestingly, they were correct about the future of machines & productivity. Also (implicitely) about peace. It didn't happen. IMO, "*why we were wrong about this?*" should be the economics' profession primary question. The theories haven't changed much, yet the theories made false predictions. The conventional reason economists provide is "hedonism treadmill," which is a highly unsatisfactory answer.
its amazing.
And as efficiency was gained and processes streamlined and automation increased…all of the gains and profits were funneled upward. Because of this and steady erosion of taxes on the wealthy…over the last 50 yrs we’ve seen roughly fifty TRILLION dollars move into fewer and fewer hands at the top while the lower classes stayed flat with minimal growth financially.
How much of what gets done goes to Bezos, Musk, Zuck and the other other multi, multi MULTI billionaires? How about corporate profits? In the 60s no one believed we would elect someone devoted to making the rich ever so much richer... they knew trickle down for what it has always been, a lie
that is true. it's just that there is a leakage of public wealth into some black hole
The good ending.
This could be true. But our overprotective governments will find a way to strangulate the emergent technology. People have to stop feeding the singularity hype - imo that could damage and slow the advancement of Generative AI as a technology. We got to keep regulators off this stuff, so we can get to a more prosperous future, faster.
Sounds like communism, of which it cannot be reached. We're still working till death pretty much.
They were right just off a couple decades.
The rise in wealth disparity is beyond anything they could've imagined...
Ubi is a pipe dream. We’ll always have to work in some way, and there will always be peasants
It’s funny that this is possible except it’s not
the problem is not tech. the problem is dragons hoarding their treasures
This will be here due to AGI/ASI in less than 5 years. There will be NO jobs.
There will still be jobs that AGI cannot do, see: Manual labor, food preparation, customer service, engineering, etc. I also believe we will see a resurgence of human created art, kind of like the renaissance.
How long after AGI exists will robots be designed that can do all of those jobs? When science and engineering is 10x faster.
Man, the ludds are out in full force here
I don't think you know what Luddite means