Most willing persons have access to income by providing labor right now. If the value of that labor diminishes because AI can do most of it for cheaper/free, that is a big problem because wealth/class barriers become insurmountable and the american dream basically dies completely.

Automation in the past suffered much less from this because only a subset of jobs was affected by it, and it still relied on human labor to build, maintain and operate the machines, unlike AI.

I'm curious if AI is gonna spawn comparable "workers rights" movements like in the past, but I would expect inequality to increase a lot until some solution is found.

The problem isn't the AI it's that your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job. American's need to decenter their self worth from their jobs. Like when I quit Microsoft I literally thought I was dying, but that's all an illusion from the corporations.

The really scary part is what happens to all of the newly unemployed people between the falling prices part and the rising employment part. My guess is, governments and markets won't move quickly enough and unrest is what happens.

The real issue isn't jobs dying. It's who gets the money from all this and whether new needs show up fast enough to give people something to do. With software we don't really know the limit yet, unlike food where your stomach tells you when to stop.

Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history? It’s complicated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257 - March 2023 (172 comments)

Is certain jobs gonna be replaced? Probably.

Let’s say we make substantial advances in robotics and it makes sense to replace all the staff in McDonalds with machines? Yea, then those jobs are probably gone. But does it mean people won’t pay for an authentic restaurant experience? No, they might still wanna pay to eat food from a chef etc.

I suspect that will continue in spite of AI. Human nature doesn't change much.

There is a particular mental disorder where people will horde wealth at absolutely all costs, personal or societal, until everyone else is dead (see NZ bunkers). We commonly see this as "the billionaire class".

IF things go in that direction we need to be ready to depose all of these billionaires. I mean that quite seriously.

IF this future comes, there is a very quickly closing window where preventing them from killing all of us for their own gain is possible. After a point, surveillance and their control over state violence will be so complete that it's impossible to do anything about it.

Tasks that aren't currently feasible, will become feasible.

That's if AI ends up being as productive as they say it will be

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This is, I think, not what people mean when they say "creative" or "original".

Creativity is not simply writing something nobody has written before, as he said, that would be trivial and doesn't even require a computer, you could just shuffle a deck of cards and write out the full sequence and chances are no other person in history has written down that sequence before.

And I think Borges made a reasonable argument that simply writing down the text of Don Quixote verbatim could be a creative act.

Creativity is about _intentionally_ expressing a _point of view_ under some constraints.

When people say LLMs can't be creative, what I think mostly they are getting at is that they lack intentionality and/or a distinct point of view. (i do not have a strong opinion about whether they do or if it's impossible for them to have them)

End human history? No.

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177257

TLDR: AI won’t “end work” so much as endlessly move the goalposts, because the universe itself is too computationally messy to automate completely. The real risk isn’t mass unemployment—it’s that we’ll have infinite machine intelligence and still argue about what’s worth doing.