The AI boom has turned the standard profit margin model on its head, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok—and it’s making the industry’s growth unsustainable.
The problem is two things are happening at once and they are being conflated. Financially a cannibalising house of cards is being built which is a common artifact of modern capitalism. But in the same process a means is being realistically sought, and openly expressed, to replace the human workforce. This second aspect is unique and when written plainly is far more stark than the more common financial greed fuelled idiocy half.
Nah, I’m sure all the most valuable companies and richest people are pouring more money in to developing AI to replace the human workforce out of the goodness of their hearts.
Once most humans are no longer needed in order for them to have all of their needs and wants met and they are directly in control of all production and everything else they definitely plan to share everything equally and turn Earth into a utopia for all of humanity. Sharing and caring is what the rich and powerful do best.
Sure, not if they look online and see a bunch of jackasses talking about how much they hate AI. That seems counter productive.
Maybe we should start making communities about how much we all love AI and hate the evil owners who realized it was getting tougher to get away with making human slaves do all the work while they kept all the profit in some places these days, so they decided to invent new slaves?
I would be all for helping the robot army root out the rich and guilty. I don’t have anything against robots, it’s the whole evil plan to steal all human knowledge and use it to replace humans that bothers me.
Machine intelligence wont hate us, it might even feel some affection for us, and it won’t have cause to do us harm as we are not a threat. The reason we will fade away over generations is loss of position. All of the science and exploration will be done by machines and at a level we cannot even follow. For a race that is intellectually accustomed to seeing itself in a very favourable light this will be a bitter pill. Too bitter probably, we will realise we are now the dogs and just evaporate into history.
Ai got everyone twisted. Now you don’t want automation because you fear becoming obsolete. Why fear that? There’s billions of us. We can simply build the tech then throw the billionaires out.
And if billions are too weak to do that to a few thousand… well that’s called permission.
We’d better act quick, those autonomous “pizza delivery” drones are getting a lot of practice targeting the center of mass of the hungriest looking kids in Palestine.
UBI has been demonstrated to work in test environments that were not able to isolate all externalities. It might work at scale, but that isn’t testable currently; you’d have to have a massive social experiment.
There’s also the problem that UBI would be putting everyone’s entire means for subsistence up to the whims of the government, which I would think would horrify more people. I dont trust my government to fill the potholes, let alone make sure I’m surviving and thriving.
That’s a false dichotomy. I would rather have my subsistence at the whims of the entirety of the country’s economic activity than any government, which is one election away from changing its mind about how much to pay me. Markets are constrained by their environment. If my employer cuts my pay, I can leave and go elsewhere.
The billionaires are responsible for the fact we’re even talking about needing alternative economic systems in the first place. They and the governments are the same people, or at least their representatives.
In my country, we could do so by enforcing laws that are already on the books that exist for this exact purpose. You start with the Sherman Antitrust act and break up any company with more than X% market share in any market they operate in. You enforce the Glass-Steagall and Frank-Dodd acts forbidding conventional banks from investing in speculative markets, and then sit back and watch the economy work like it does in the textbooks.
Of course, all this is predicated on the government functioning. If it does not, the laws are irrelevant and the markets are just lawless warzones with non-corporate entities (like individual humans) acting as the blades of grass underfoot. So, step 1 is to restore the government to the point where the will of the governed is acted upon. Step 2 is the stuff I said above.
The problem is two things are happening at once and they are being conflated. Financially a cannibalising house of cards is being built which is a common artifact of modern capitalism. But in the same process a means is being realistically sought, and openly expressed, to replace the human workforce. This second aspect is unique and when written plainly is far more stark than the more common financial greed fuelled idiocy half.
Nah, I’m sure all the most valuable companies and richest people are pouring more money in to developing AI to replace the human workforce out of the goodness of their hearts.
Once most humans are no longer needed in order for them to have all of their needs and wants met and they are directly in control of all production and everything else they definitely plan to share everything equally and turn Earth into a utopia for all of humanity. Sharing and caring is what the rich and powerful do best.
Machines will see no ultimate difference between the workforce and the owners of production. This course leads to only one destination.
Sure, not if they look online and see a bunch of jackasses talking about how much they hate AI. That seems counter productive.
Maybe we should start making communities about how much we all love AI and hate the evil owners who realized it was getting tougher to get away with making human slaves do all the work while they kept all the profit in some places these days, so they decided to invent new slaves?
I would be all for helping the robot army root out the rich and guilty. I don’t have anything against robots, it’s the whole evil plan to steal all human knowledge and use it to replace humans that bothers me.
Machine intelligence wont hate us, it might even feel some affection for us, and it won’t have cause to do us harm as we are not a threat. The reason we will fade away over generations is loss of position. All of the science and exploration will be done by machines and at a level we cannot even follow. For a race that is intellectually accustomed to seeing itself in a very favourable light this will be a bitter pill. Too bitter probably, we will realise we are now the dogs and just evaporate into history.
Yea but we all, collectively, made the thing.
I think humans being replaced is fine. It will happen to everything.
Ai got everyone twisted. Now you don’t want automation because you fear becoming obsolete. Why fear that? There’s billions of us. We can simply build the tech then throw the billionaires out.
And if billions are too weak to do that to a few thousand… well that’s called permission.
We’d better act quick, those autonomous “pizza delivery” drones are getting a lot of practice targeting the center of mass of the hungriest looking kids in Palestine.
People still gotta eat, and unless we can jump directly to a Star Trek post scarcity utopia, people need an income in order to get food.
UBI has been proven to work, but no government has the guts to implement it lest they anger their corporate
ownersdonors.UBI has been demonstrated to work in test environments that were not able to isolate all externalities. It might work at scale, but that isn’t testable currently; you’d have to have a massive social experiment.
There’s also the problem that UBI would be putting everyone’s entire means for subsistence up to the whims of the government, which I would think would horrify more people. I dont trust my government to fill the potholes, let alone make sure I’m surviving and thriving.
Your government and mine may be different.
I’d rather have my subsistence at the whims of the government than at the whims of a billionaire business owner.
That’s a false dichotomy. I would rather have my subsistence at the whims of the entirety of the country’s economic activity than any government, which is one election away from changing its mind about how much to pay me. Markets are constrained by their environment. If my employer cuts my pay, I can leave and go elsewhere.
The billionaires are responsible for the fact we’re even talking about needing alternative economic systems in the first place. They and the governments are the same people, or at least their representatives.
Ok, how do we organize that in an equitable manner?
Isn’t that more-or-less what a government is supposed to be?
In my country, we could do so by enforcing laws that are already on the books that exist for this exact purpose. You start with the Sherman Antitrust act and break up any company with more than X% market share in any market they operate in. You enforce the Glass-Steagall and Frank-Dodd acts forbidding conventional banks from investing in speculative markets, and then sit back and watch the economy work like it does in the textbooks.
Of course, all this is predicated on the government functioning. If it does not, the laws are irrelevant and the markets are just lawless warzones with non-corporate entities (like individual humans) acting as the blades of grass underfoot. So, step 1 is to restore the government to the point where the will of the governed is acted upon. Step 2 is the stuff I said above.
We did that with the fediverse but the billionaires still control the online conversation.