This is a really poorly argued article, not sure even where to start dismantling the author's arguments. (Almost feels like ChatGPT wrote this article).
But let's start with this "If H&R Block could replace 90 percent of its seasonal employees with AI, it would see its profits skyrocket, given that labor is its biggest expense. Those profits would be reallocated elsewhere, that would increase the potential for even more economic growth, and that would in turn create better opportunities for the accountants."
=> Lol, no. It doesn't work that way. H&R block, if any, will allocate more to share buy backs, and the size of the tax filing "pie" won't increase due to AI.
Exactly. Rich people tend to horde their wealth and seek more. When they have an opportunity to extract wealth from others they do so. The increase in economic growth from this extraction is minimal in comparison to the amount extracted.
This is not correct. Look up rent seeking. If a company has regulatory capture it can seek the maximum profit and remain static (until it loses its capture). Generally it attains its maximum by exercising its pricing power. Exercising pricing power does not lead to more employees by the company.
Profit is the accumulation of promises other people have made to you that they will work for you in the future.
That is, after all, why people seek profit. They like the security in knowing that others will do work for them in the future. When you feel hungry, you want to know that someone will work to give you food. When you feel cold, you want to know that someone will work to provide you shelter. When you feel bored, you want to know that someone will work to entertain you. So on and so forth.
Unless people can offer work that you want to have done in the future, you cannot profit. Rent seeking doesn't change anything. You still need valid promises of future work in order to profit.
Your knowledge of economics appears to be lacking. Your original statement that the only way to extract wealth from someone is by putting them to work is factually wrong for the reasons I stated.
> Your knowledge of economics appears to be lacking.
Well, duh. If it weren't lacking, what reason would there be for me to talk about it? There would be nothing left to learn. That would be a useless waste of time.
> Your original statement that the only way to extract wealth from someone is by putting them to work is factually wrong for the reasons I stated.
Go on. You stated that rent seeking accumulates profit, but as profit is merely the promise of future work, no wealth is actually extracted. Only a potential promise of future wealth is gained. Not until the profit is spent – as in people are put to work – can wealth be extracted out of those promises.
For extrinsic financial gain, sure, but that doesn't apply here. The only potential gain here is the possibility of learning something.
Just as you have demonstrated yourself. You are no doubt knowledgeable in the subject, but have completely refused to talk about it, spending all your time focused on my character. Which is to be expected, as what more are you going to learn about the topic at hand? The only thing you might stand to learn something about is me.
Poor people spend a larger share of their income (and therefore put it to productive use stimulating the economy, hiring people, etc). Rich people tend to hoard their pile, and spend a smaller portion of it.
> The only way to “extract wealth from others” is to put them to work.
I guess you're thinking of people who have no assets. In that case, you're right, when people have no other wealth their labor is all that's left to extract. (And all they have left to trade for their daily expenses.)
What happens to people with no other wealth in an AI economy where labor has little value? That's a scary thought.
> I guess you're thinking of people who have no assets.
Even of those who do. Wealth cannot be extracted from existing wealth.
> What happens to people with no other wealth in an AI economy where labor has little value? That's a scary thought.
Will people with AI be happy to metaphorically scurry off into the forest and life alone with nothing other than their AI? So long as there is value in human-to-human social interaction, there will be value in labour. The labour may not resemble anything we can imagine today, but it will be there in some form.
And even if we assume that those with AI do go off and live life alone in the forest, those who don't have AI will still need other people in their lives, so labour will continue to hold value within that subset of the population.
Alternatively, those with AI may freely share it with all, creating a post-scarcity society. That's probably not so scary. Hell, entire societies have upended everything in hopes of being able to transition into a post-scarcity world. It is generally considered a welcome future, not something to fear.
Yes. Rich people tend to re-invest their money and not throw it into a Scrooge McDuck vault to swim in. The re-investing is what helps create economic growth.
> H&R block, if any, will allocate more to share buy backs
Okay, but then whomever owned the share previously and accepted the profit in exchange for giving the share back now holds the profit instead. What are they going to do with it?
Buy houses and lots, keep them empty, and speculate on their value.
Or just build their 6th mansion that uses a plot of land that could fit 400 apartments, keeping the people underneath them commuting 1 hour from their 80 square meter apartment.
You should familiarize yourself with the actual research on this topic, since ill-informed speculation on well-studied topics doesn't contribute to a helpful discussion. The subject you want to study is called "marginal propensity to consume."
> You should familiarize yourself with the actual research on this topic
That's why we are here, but, frankly, I'll take ill-informed speculation over whatever the hell this is. What on earth is the point of using a discussion forum if you are going to outsource the useful words to other people? If they wanted to contribute to the discussion, they would do so themselves.
In fairness, perhaps you accidentally hit submit before you were finished?
My claim is that H&R Block would replace all their workers for more efficient AI if it was more profitable. Then they would re-invest that money in the most productive way they can – other companies, etc. This is the same strategy as Apple, Microsoft and other companies do with large amounts of cash.
I don't claim H&R Block would be directly creating new jobs. They would try to maximize profit by investing their profits and diversifying.
Why would H&R Block even exist? In this AI-maximalist version of the future, I could just spin up my copy of Llama 25, and it’d do my taxes in seconds. Pennies to the local utility board for the energy. Not much value circulating in the economy to be reinvested anywhere.
The future isn’t a fixed point. But before then H&R Block (or a company like them) will probably shift to AI. Then eventually your AI will mean you don’t even need them.
Does anyone have a single example of a well reasoned good Reason.com article? This seems to be a no worse than average example from them. There's some ridiculous slant serving some glaringly biased agenda, with terrible argumentation.
Sources like Reason getting submitted & discussed as though their normal submissions is usually an incredibly silly time. I don't think the site should do it, but on Bluesky there's moderation layers, and it seriously makes me want something like that for the web at large, where we can turn on some kind of content warning as we browse. Content warning: specious/suspect sight. Content warning: strong agenda.
It's a bad time that the noosphere keeps happening with so little memory. That there's not cues and contexts to be like, hey, this is Reason or Quilette: don't expect normal content here.
A few paragraphs in, the statements felt generic and lacked supporting details to the point I got that uncanny valley sense of LLM writing. It doesn’t seem like this piece adds much that hasn’t already been said.
To be unemployed means that you want to do work for others, but cannot find anyone who wants you to work for them. In what way does Star Trek paint not being able to get what you want as utopia?
Though Star Trek, countless Americans also had vicarious access to mental health care. After a good episode, the world seems to make more sense, and one's outlook is more optimistic.
When you have the technology to replicate virtually any foodstuff to perfection instantly, restaurants become less common, and may take on different meaning (as more social hangouts rather than food-service places). Accordingly, the ST universe just might have enough bored, centuries-old El-Aurians looking for conversation and company to fill all the needed service roles there are -- and such roles are more relaxed and stimulating besides.
a) No disentanglement of growth factors. Economic growth tied to expansion of consumer base is slowing for demographic reasons and more crucially, key markets in the knowledge economy are demand saturated - attention economy for example is not growing - it peaked in the pandemic and outside of policy intervention, there’s very limited growth potential.
b) Failure to spell out the transformer as machine that prints machines. The transformer extracts the rules of creation from the corpus of human created labor results and automatically produces the replication function. The technology may be in its infancy, but it will only improve.
c) Historically adjustment for new job creation has operated on a multi decade timescale, complimentary to the often massive infrastructure needs (wires, power plants, distribution infrastructure) but this technology does not have those requirements. The app stores, fiber lines, machines, API platforms all exist. Adopting products can happen in months. The loop from science to product is months (see vision transformer)
d) Do I spot trickle down economics? Are we gonna invoke this boomer level of delusional narrative for the next 20
years again despite the iron clad metrics showing it’s wishful thinking to appeal to certain ideological positions rather than grounded in any kind of reality. The gains from operational efficiency will become stock buybacks, yachts, macadamia
chewing cows and vanity dildos flying to space.
Appealing to history is all fine and dandy, but one has to spell out the divergent core conditions to have a serious conversation - this article feels like faith, not well reasoned forecasting or even science fiction
A. Some parts of the economy will grow. Some will shrink. My claim is that if you believe that AI will create new efficiencies and continue to do so, then overall economic growth will increase at a faster rate than ever.
B. Predicting what architecture could lead to this growth is beyond the scope of this article. The point was to say that if we keep getting increased efficiencies we'll get increased growth.
C. Job creation accelerates. Before I was hired at OpenAI in 2020, nobody on the planet had ever been hired as a prompt engineer. Now it's a career (at least for the time being.)
D. I'm assuming maximizing profit in the most near-sighted way possible. Same as it has ever been.
Is there a specific claim or argument that you disagree with?
I may have missed something. What are saying specifically?
Okun's law shows a strong correlation between GDP and employment. Which runs counter to your previous claim – as I understand it (please forgive me if I'm not understanding it correctly.)
Did you make a comment somewhere else that I missed?
Change is equally hard to comprehend. Two centuries ago, 80 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. If you told one of those farmers that in 2024 barely 1 percent of the population would work on farms, he'd have a difficult time imagining what the other 79 percent of the population would do with their time. If you then tried to explain what an average income could purchase in the way of a Netflix subscription, airplane transportation, and a car, he'd think you were insane. The same principle applies to imagining life 50 years from now."
Those two centuries ago probably yes. Three decades ago probably not. The world is in a much darker place than the 90s. And our extreme consumption is partly to blame, as is internet manipulation of the masses.
Cancer treatment is way better now than even a few years ago. Miles ahead of the 90s.
The bee population in America is supposedly growing very quickly thanks in part to tax breaks in Texas.
Global poverty is way down. Large part of that is China.
Gay rights have come a long way. Not perfect, but it’s nice that generally people can be more open about who they are.
I absolutely love all the open source projects out there for almost anything I want.
Yeah, we could be doing better. Much better. But it’s actually unlikely we will hit the worst case scenarios for climate change. The developing world is going to get rocked by the 2+C temperature increase, but it won’t be an extinction event, there is still more we can do, and there is much less denialism than the 90s or 00s.
There's some positives yes but it feels like world in decline gearing up for war.
Russia and China are again extremely adversarial and autocratic, the US is tearing itself apart in political polarisation. In my own country the extreme right fascists won 24% of votes. Gay rights are ok but Trans people are being demonised by the right now. As a whole it feels like the LGBTQ+ community is under attack. Big corporations are getting ever more powerful.
The internet is decidedly less free and very enshittified and we get tracked and surveilled wherever we go, online or not.
And no it won't be an extinction event but it will be heavy for the marginal people everywhere, leading to even more differences between rich and poor and even more pressure to equalise this by war.
And in the 90s we had much better social welfare safety nets here. Three decades of neoliberal government hollowed out anything good here in Holland. The rage of the disadvantaged by this are what's fueling this swing to fascism, they take advantage of this anger and redirect it to worse.
Having to work forever sounds miserable. I think there would be some psychological impacts as well around how we'd treat life, risk taking, etc. While many things would improve, it feels like seeing the natural wonders fade away for developments and stuff would be worse. Like we'd be trading human connection, general freedom, and privacy for more stuff.
I am excited about some stuff in the future, but I'm more pessimistic about how ever increasingly complicated and expensive life will become. There are a few things that I enjoy where I can already see the writing on the wall for them to disappear or be banned.
Sure, somebody that works constantly in a field might not spend that much time imagining what the majority of the country would do if they weren't working all the time.
But some other people that have much less demanding jobs did think that in the future people would barely work. This has become much more true for Europe than USA although as you'll see pointed out all the time, USA salaries are higher then Europe.
I suspect Keynes was a socialist since he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society.
> "But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" [1]
> he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society. [...] we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.
And approximately a decade later, the United States did just that. The workweek was reduced to 40 hours to make what work there was to be done as widely as possible. He didn't get the number of hours quite right, but nailed the overall premise.
Indeed. Is there a browser extension or something that replaces every reason.com article on Hackernews with a corresponding jacobin.com article? For this one, there's an acceptable substitute on the front page right now: https://jacobin.com/2024/01/can-humanity-survive-ai
This is a really poorly argued article, not sure even where to start dismantling the author's arguments. (Almost feels like ChatGPT wrote this article).
But let's start with this "If H&R Block could replace 90 percent of its seasonal employees with AI, it would see its profits skyrocket, given that labor is its biggest expense. Those profits would be reallocated elsewhere, that would increase the potential for even more economic growth, and that would in turn create better opportunities for the accountants."
=> Lol, no. It doesn't work that way. H&R block, if any, will allocate more to share buy backs, and the size of the tax filing "pie" won't increase due to AI.
Exactly. Rich people tend to horde their wealth and seek more. When they have an opportunity to extract wealth from others they do so. The increase in economic growth from this extraction is minimal in comparison to the amount extracted.
The only way to “extract wealth from others” is to put them to work.
This is not correct. Look up rent seeking. If a company has regulatory capture it can seek the maximum profit and remain static (until it loses its capture). Generally it attains its maximum by exercising its pricing power. Exercising pricing power does not lead to more employees by the company.
Profit is the accumulation of promises other people have made to you that they will work for you in the future.
That is, after all, why people seek profit. They like the security in knowing that others will do work for them in the future. When you feel hungry, you want to know that someone will work to give you food. When you feel cold, you want to know that someone will work to provide you shelter. When you feel bored, you want to know that someone will work to entertain you. So on and so forth.
Unless people can offer work that you want to have done in the future, you cannot profit. Rent seeking doesn't change anything. You still need valid promises of future work in order to profit.
Your knowledge of economics appears to be lacking. Your original statement that the only way to extract wealth from someone is by putting them to work is factually wrong for the reasons I stated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
> Your knowledge of economics appears to be lacking.
Well, duh. If it weren't lacking, what reason would there be for me to talk about it? There would be nothing left to learn. That would be a useless waste of time.
> Your original statement that the only way to extract wealth from someone is by putting them to work is factually wrong for the reasons I stated.
Go on. You stated that rent seeking accumulates profit, but as profit is merely the promise of future work, no wealth is actually extracted. Only a potential promise of future wealth is gained. Not until the profit is spent – as in people are put to work – can wealth be extracted out of those promises.
If it weren't lacking, what reason would there be for me to talk about it?
In case you don’t know this there are people knowledgeable about a topic who also talk about that topic.
For extrinsic financial gain, sure, but that doesn't apply here. The only potential gain here is the possibility of learning something.
Just as you have demonstrated yourself. You are no doubt knowledgeable in the subject, but have completely refused to talk about it, spending all your time focused on my character. Which is to be expected, as what more are you going to learn about the topic at hand? The only thing you might stand to learn something about is me.
For extrinsic financial gain,…
This is not necessarily true. Sometimes people do things without financial gain.
Right. People will also discuss topics in order to learn.
Poor people spend a larger share of their income (and therefore put it to productive use stimulating the economy, hiring people, etc). Rich people tend to hoard their pile, and spend a smaller portion of it.
> The only way to “extract wealth from others” is to put them to work.
I guess you're thinking of people who have no assets. In that case, you're right, when people have no other wealth their labor is all that's left to extract. (And all they have left to trade for their daily expenses.)
What happens to people with no other wealth in an AI economy where labor has little value? That's a scary thought.
> I guess you're thinking of people who have no assets.
Even of those who do. Wealth cannot be extracted from existing wealth.
> What happens to people with no other wealth in an AI economy where labor has little value? That's a scary thought.
Will people with AI be happy to metaphorically scurry off into the forest and life alone with nothing other than their AI? So long as there is value in human-to-human social interaction, there will be value in labour. The labour may not resemble anything we can imagine today, but it will be there in some form.
And even if we assume that those with AI do go off and live life alone in the forest, those who don't have AI will still need other people in their lives, so labour will continue to hold value within that subset of the population.
Alternatively, those with AI may freely share it with all, creating a post-scarcity society. That's probably not so scary. Hell, entire societies have upended everything in hopes of being able to transition into a post-scarcity world. It is generally considered a welcome future, not something to fear.
exactly, the only reason to hire someone is because you’re making money off their work.
Well at big companies, managers sometimes hire just for the sake of padding their orgs
Original author here:
Yes. Rich people tend to re-invest their money and not throw it into a Scrooge McDuck vault to swim in. The re-investing is what helps create economic growth.
> H&R block, if any, will allocate more to share buy backs
Okay, but then whomever owned the share previously and accepted the profit in exchange for giving the share back now holds the profit instead. What are they going to do with it?
Buy houses and lots, keep them empty, and speculate on their value.
Or just build their 6th mansion that uses a plot of land that could fit 400 apartments, keeping the people underneath them commuting 1 hour from their 80 square meter apartment.
> Buy houses and lots, keep them empty, and speculate on their value.
But then the profit is given to whomever previously owned the property. What are they going to do with it?
> Or just build their 6th mansion
That puts people to work, violating the premise here.
You should familiarize yourself with the actual research on this topic, since ill-informed speculation on well-studied topics doesn't contribute to a helpful discussion. The subject you want to study is called "marginal propensity to consume."
> You should familiarize yourself with the actual research on this topic
That's why we are here, but, frankly, I'll take ill-informed speculation over whatever the hell this is. What on earth is the point of using a discussion forum if you are going to outsource the useful words to other people? If they wanted to contribute to the discussion, they would do so themselves.
In fairness, perhaps you accidentally hit submit before you were finished?
Some will buy second or third homes, and lobby to prevent new development in more markets.
> Some will buy second or third homes
Which, again, merely trades the profit to whomever previously owned the homes. What are they going to do with the profit?
Hoard it
Original author here (not ChatGPT):
My claim is that H&R Block would replace all their workers for more efficient AI if it was more profitable. Then they would re-invest that money in the most productive way they can – other companies, etc. This is the same strategy as Apple, Microsoft and other companies do with large amounts of cash.
I don't claim H&R Block would be directly creating new jobs. They would try to maximize profit by investing their profits and diversifying.
Why would H&R Block even exist? In this AI-maximalist version of the future, I could just spin up my copy of Llama 25, and it’d do my taxes in seconds. Pennies to the local utility board for the energy. Not much value circulating in the economy to be reinvested anywhere.
Eventually that will probably be the case.
The future isn’t a fixed point. But before then H&R Block (or a company like them) will probably shift to AI. Then eventually your AI will mean you don’t even need them.
The disruptors will get disrupted.
I feel like the author has missed the concept of “Past performance is no guarantee of future results”.
Yes, it's not guarantee, but it is one good data source for predicting the future.
See Rule 5 in https://hbr.org/2007/07/six-rules-for-effective-forecasting
Does anyone have a single example of a well reasoned good Reason.com article? This seems to be a no worse than average example from them. There's some ridiculous slant serving some glaringly biased agenda, with terrible argumentation.
Sources like Reason getting submitted & discussed as though their normal submissions is usually an incredibly silly time. I don't think the site should do it, but on Bluesky there's moderation layers, and it seriously makes me want something like that for the web at large, where we can turn on some kind of content warning as we browse. Content warning: specious/suspect sight. Content warning: strong agenda.
It's a bad time that the noosphere keeps happening with so little memory. That there's not cues and contexts to be like, hey, this is Reason or Quilette: don't expect normal content here.
What biased agenda do you see in this article?
The future will be AI generated spam content across all internet in hope of passive income
Putting human spam-labor out of work, too.
Kind of a click-bait title, eh?
A few paragraphs in, the statements felt generic and lacked supporting details to the point I got that uncanny valley sense of LLM writing. It doesn’t seem like this piece adds much that hasn’t already been said.
Isn't zero-precent unemployment the exact opposite of the star trek utopia we were promised?
To be unemployed means that you want to do work for others, but cannot find anyone who wants you to work for them. In what way does Star Trek paint not being able to get what you want as utopia?
Not really. In Star Trek, you have access to mental healthcare and the educational resources to go do something you want to do. Then that’s the work.
I think it’s a little unbelievable that the right proportion of people want to, say, serve food at a restaurant. But that’s the idea.
Though Star Trek, countless Americans also had vicarious access to mental health care. After a good episode, the world seems to make more sense, and one's outlook is more optimistic.
When you have the technology to replicate virtually any foodstuff to perfection instantly, restaurants become less common, and may take on different meaning (as more social hangouts rather than food-service places). Accordingly, the ST universe just might have enough bored, centuries-old El-Aurians looking for conversation and company to fill all the needed service roles there are -- and such roles are more relaxed and stimulating besides.
I think you’re totally right. I am skeptical but hopeful. :)
Mindblowingly poor argumentation.
a) No disentanglement of growth factors. Economic growth tied to expansion of consumer base is slowing for demographic reasons and more crucially, key markets in the knowledge economy are demand saturated - attention economy for example is not growing - it peaked in the pandemic and outside of policy intervention, there’s very limited growth potential.
b) Failure to spell out the transformer as machine that prints machines. The transformer extracts the rules of creation from the corpus of human created labor results and automatically produces the replication function. The technology may be in its infancy, but it will only improve.
c) Historically adjustment for new job creation has operated on a multi decade timescale, complimentary to the often massive infrastructure needs (wires, power plants, distribution infrastructure) but this technology does not have those requirements. The app stores, fiber lines, machines, API platforms all exist. Adopting products can happen in months. The loop from science to product is months (see vision transformer)
d) Do I spot trickle down economics? Are we gonna invoke this boomer level of delusional narrative for the next 20 years again despite the iron clad metrics showing it’s wishful thinking to appeal to certain ideological positions rather than grounded in any kind of reality. The gains from operational efficiency will become stock buybacks, yachts, macadamia chewing cows and vanity dildos flying to space.
Appealing to history is all fine and dandy, but one has to spell out the divergent core conditions to have a serious conversation - this article feels like faith, not well reasoned forecasting or even science fiction
Original author here:
A. Some parts of the economy will grow. Some will shrink. My claim is that if you believe that AI will create new efficiencies and continue to do so, then overall economic growth will increase at a faster rate than ever.
B. Predicting what architecture could lead to this growth is beyond the scope of this article. The point was to say that if we keep getting increased efficiencies we'll get increased growth.
C. Job creation accelerates. Before I was hired at OpenAI in 2020, nobody on the planet had ever been hired as a prompt engineer. Now it's a career (at least for the time being.)
D. I'm assuming maximizing profit in the most near-sighted way possible. Same as it has ever been.
Is there a specific claim or argument that you disagree with?
Growth does not equal jobs and you probably know that.
Okun’s Law has held up pretty well over the last 60 years. Are you aware of any research that disputes that other than the degree of the coefficient?
I think my original reply you keep trying to ignore answers that one just fine
I may have missed something. What are saying specifically?
Okun's law shows a strong correlation between GDP and employment. Which runs counter to your previous claim – as I understand it (please forgive me if I'm not understanding it correctly.)
Did you make a comment somewhere else that I missed?
Good evidence of this is how Gary, IN is thriving after automation reduced the steel plant labor requirements by 90%.
except for the very vague argument that tech disruptions in the past created more jobs there is not really any argument supporting that claim.
Would have been nice to explain how people would be employed in an AI scenario and how they would benefit from the surpluses created by it.
TLDR: "The future is bigger than we can imagine.
Change is equally hard to comprehend. Two centuries ago, 80 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. If you told one of those farmers that in 2024 barely 1 percent of the population would work on farms, he'd have a difficult time imagining what the other 79 percent of the population would do with their time. If you then tried to explain what an average income could purchase in the way of a Netflix subscription, airplane transportation, and a car, he'd think you were insane. The same principle applies to imagining life 50 years from now."
Makes me sound old, but I'm sort of glad we don't live forever. Putting up with that kind of change sounds miserable.
really?
i would love to live forever, because these changes have been beneficial, and those who lived two centuries go would've loved to trade places.
Those two centuries ago probably yes. Three decades ago probably not. The world is in a much darker place than the 90s. And our extreme consumption is partly to blame, as is internet manipulation of the masses.
Cancer treatment is way better now than even a few years ago. Miles ahead of the 90s.
The bee population in America is supposedly growing very quickly thanks in part to tax breaks in Texas.
Global poverty is way down. Large part of that is China.
Gay rights have come a long way. Not perfect, but it’s nice that generally people can be more open about who they are.
I absolutely love all the open source projects out there for almost anything I want.
Yeah, we could be doing better. Much better. But it’s actually unlikely we will hit the worst case scenarios for climate change. The developing world is going to get rocked by the 2+C temperature increase, but it won’t be an extinction event, there is still more we can do, and there is much less denialism than the 90s or 00s.
Am I touching too much grass?
There's some positives yes but it feels like world in decline gearing up for war.
Russia and China are again extremely adversarial and autocratic, the US is tearing itself apart in political polarisation. In my own country the extreme right fascists won 24% of votes. Gay rights are ok but Trans people are being demonised by the right now. As a whole it feels like the LGBTQ+ community is under attack. Big corporations are getting ever more powerful.
The internet is decidedly less free and very enshittified and we get tracked and surveilled wherever we go, online or not.
And no it won't be an extinction event but it will be heavy for the marginal people everywhere, leading to even more differences between rich and poor and even more pressure to equalise this by war.
And in the 90s we had much better social welfare safety nets here. Three decades of neoliberal government hollowed out anything good here in Holland. The rage of the disadvantaged by this are what's fueling this swing to fascism, they take advantage of this anger and redirect it to worse.
Having to work forever sounds miserable. I think there would be some psychological impacts as well around how we'd treat life, risk taking, etc. While many things would improve, it feels like seeing the natural wonders fade away for developments and stuff would be worse. Like we'd be trading human connection, general freedom, and privacy for more stuff.
I am excited about some stuff in the future, but I'm more pessimistic about how ever increasingly complicated and expensive life will become. There are a few things that I enjoy where I can already see the writing on the wall for them to disappear or be banned.
Sure, somebody that works constantly in a field might not spend that much time imagining what the majority of the country would do if they weren't working all the time.
But some other people that have much less demanding jobs did think that in the future people would barely work. This has become much more true for Europe than USA although as you'll see pointed out all the time, USA salaries are higher then Europe.
I suspect Keynes was a socialist since he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society.
> "But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" [1]
[1]: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
> he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society. [...] we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.
And approximately a decade later, the United States did just that. The workweek was reduced to 40 hours to make what work there was to be done as widely as possible. He didn't get the number of hours quite right, but nailed the overall premise.
Will there be 0 unhappiness, 0 darkness, 0 pain, 0 death, 0 risk, 0 inflation also ?
I don't think anything will stay stagnant enough for us to even comprehend what life will be like in the future.
Let me guess, the populace will be 100% self employed publishing AI generated books on Amazon.
How to read an HN subject line:
WRONG:
In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment
RIGHT:
In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment (reason.com)
TL:DR;
(reason.com)
Indeed. Is there a browser extension or something that replaces every reason.com article on Hackernews with a corresponding jacobin.com article? For this one, there's an acceptable substitute on the front page right now: https://jacobin.com/2024/01/can-humanity-survive-ai
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