| Shadow1980 said: "AI" is just a tool. The actual question is ask is "Can the people who stand to profit or otherwise benefit from it be trusted to use it responsibly?" The answer to that question is a resounding, unequivocal "No." |
(Sorry I cut out your post to keep this answer readable.)
I agree, but I would add: this current way of organizing society and production is not inevitable or without alternative. And I don't mean soviet style socialism or going back to aristrocratic feudalism. And there is a chance here from AI too. Capitalism was so successful, because it is brilliant in optimizing for a scarce resource: human labour. But it fails once labour is not scarce anymore. Which we partly already have and is strengthened by the AI revolution. In this capitalism and free markets will collapse itself, because worker wages are not only means of production, they are also needed to become consumers to buy these products. So the companies will release most workers and save a lot of money, only to see their businesses crash because most people are poor.
To solve the problem we need to decouple securing the basic livelyhood of people (food, living space and so on) from working. I personally like the idea of UBI, but I am sure clever people have more clever solutions. We just need to implement them. And not only because of AI, capitalism is also preventing a sokution for climate change. And AI may give us the needs, because these ideas aren't anymore "too expensive" and "naive fairy tales". If AI can replace a lot of labour, we can generate easily enough to secure peoples lives and guarantee a basic lifestyle. There is no "but then the economy crumbles under the load of the freeloaders" anymore. Because AI can increase production efficiency enough to handle the freeloaders.
And a recommendation, 10 years ago author Marshall Brain wrote a story that now seems very prophetic: "Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future". In which he describes how a computer program is able to take over more and more work and replace the workers. And society collapses. But it is named two views, because he also shows an alternative, in which the same software is used to serve humans and humanity instead of corporations. It is a free read on his homepage:
https://marshallbrain.com/manna
Last edited by Mnementh - on 07 September 2023
