(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

Actually, in Star Trek machines and computers help to build a society no longer under the problems money creates. Conflict in Star Trek is external, not internal.

Humans make AI and can make it as dishonest and two-faced as they want.
Nuclear Fission is just science, it's humans that choose whether to use it to make bombs or electricity.
AI is just a tool, not an animal (animals can be two-faced as well, deception is a survival strategy), a tool humankind might not be ready for yet.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/07/ebay-rolls-out-a-tool-that-generates-product-listings-from-photos/

eBay is rolling out a new AI tool for marketplace sellers that can generate a product listing from a single photo.

Available in the eBay app for iOS to start, with the Android app to follow in the coming weeks, the tool can automatically write a title and description based on a photo, as well as information including a product release date, and suggest a category, subcategory, list price and shipping cost.

The tool builds on eBay’s other efforts to inject AI into the selling process, including AI-generated product catalog descriptions and a background removal tool for listing photos.


Whatever can go wrong. How does the AI know the condition of the item.

My wife is part of the Ebay Thrifting Group since she sold on their long ago. The reactions are mostly negative there with posts like:
"I used it to sell my camera, the AI made it it included a lens kit"
"The AI wrote three paragraphs about my item including a lot of errors and wrong information. The time it took to clean it up and correct it would have been better spend just writing the description"
"I wanted to sell a Gorilla stuffy, the AI generated the title 'Black people plushie'"

Beware, soon you'll have anyone with a phone snapping pictures and fire and forget it to Ebay.
It's also coming to Amazon marketplace and Shopify. So don't trust anything you read there.

Reviews are already worthless and highly suspect. What's next.

Personally, I think we should move to some sort of co-op-based system, where the workers directly and equitably own and control the means of production and vote for whoever is in leadership positions. Just as I don't trust wealthy businessmen to run the economy for everyone's benefit, I don't trust the state to do so, either. Sure, the state is better for running a handful of essential big-picture public goods like infrastructure, emergency services, defense, public safety, prisons, and health insurance (whenever those things get privatized, it's a disaster for everyone but the shareholders), but government bureaucracy shouldn't be the ones tasked with determining things like, say, what flavors of ice cream are made, what works of entertainment are produced, or what components go into consumer electronics. As I said, our only choices aren't Ayn Rand and Vladimir Lenin.

Barring a move to a co-op based system, I think an acceptable alternative would be to mandate that all voting shares in a publicly-traded corporation be split equally among all employees (and only employees), from the CEO on down to the janitor.

In any case, we really do need some sort of workplace democracy, where workers have actual power over their labor and working conditions. Economic power should lie with the people directly and be spread out as diffusely as possible. Organized labor and its ability to collectively bargain and go on strikes is the only power any workers have right now, and even that can result in long, protracted disputes. That would be unnecessary if the workers owned and controlled things directly.

And if the workers were the ones in charge of the economy, we'd be able to integrate new labor-saving technology into the economy in a way that services the people rather than some small class of ultra-wealthy individuals who seek to perpetually grow their personal fortunes.

Hehe, UBI and co-ops aren't exclusive to each other, both can be happen at the same time.

Anyways, you are right. We are often talking up democracy (for good reasons), but then unquestioned accept that economy is basically an aristocracy. Companies are lead undemocratic. We should democratize the economy.

How would such a system work? Who pays for the machines, buildings, materials...?

Each worker equaly? What about workers who can't afford their share?

How would the benefits be distributed?

And would you trust everyone of your co-workers to treat everyone else fairly and in the same way?

The same way co-ops, credit unions, and other entities collectively owned by their workers and/or customers do right now. These things already exist and have demonstrated their viability.

I guess it really is easier for most to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

In any case, we can do better than the current power dynamic, which has stacked the deck against the working class. And I'd trust my fellow workers more than I'd trust some executive I've never met who would discard me in a moment's notice because they thought cutting jobs was the best way to maximize profits this quarter. "Fairness" doesn't exist to the capitalist class, nor does "justice." The only thing that matters to them is growing profits. They've already demonstrated they cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

Since this forum is dedicated to video games and the "AI" issue is usually looked at in regards to its impact on entertainment, let's stick to that industry. Every single thing we complain about with our entertainment is a direct consequence of the profit motive. Tired of endless film reboots? Hate how aggressive monetization is ruining games? Angry that a good show you enjoyed got canceled? Blame capitalism. The goal of a film studio or game publisher is to generate ever-growing profits for the shareholders, not to produce art & entertainment for the sake of art & entertainment. Art, film, music, literature, video games, and the people who do the actual labor to create those things are viewed purely as commodities. Everything people like Bobby Kotick and David Zaslav did during their careers was for the sake of profit, and there's countless others like them throughout the entertainment industry.

Looking at gaming specifically, console gaming and "AAA" gaming in general hit a brick wall years ago and has more or less stopped growing. Now it's mostly just competition for market share in a market of more or less fixed size. If your goal is to grow profits but you're not selling any more systems or games, you have to find new revenue streams. That's where "live service/GAAS" games come in. Microtransactions, battle passes, and the like cost relatively little to make yet are sold at a massive markup, and guarantees continued revenue from the "whales" over the course of the game's life. So many games were turned into highly-manipulative microtransaction delivery systems because some executive saw dollar signs.

The profit motive is also why "crunch" exists, because the publishers need to maximize productivity as much as humanly possible, even if it's to the detriment of the workers. The increased complexity of games means larger teams and longer dev cycles and therefore greater labor costs, so the studios are incentivized to squeeze the most they can out of their labor force, even it results in burn-out, negative impacts on mental & physical health, and other deleterious effects. If it wasn't for the fact that a video game takes actually skilled labor to make, the Bobby Koticks of the world would have long since hired sweatshop laborers paid $5 a day to make their games, all while biding their time to replace even those workers with an "AI" algorithm that could do all the work.

And this is just our entertainment. There are things of far greater importance run by people with the exact same mentality as film or gaming executives. Look at what the energy sector has done to our environment. Look at how tobacco companies harmed the health of millions of people across multiple generations. Look at how our for-profit health care system has put money over lives, giving the U.S. a health care system that costs far more per capita than most other peer nations yet produces objectively worse outcomes. Look at how the automobile industry has devastated our cities and our environment. Look at how the firearms industry has turned this nation into a bloodbath, with people getting slaughtered in the streets, in schools, in workplaces, and so on on what is now a daily basis.

The long, sordid, exploitative history of capitalism has shown that businessmen can and will do anything they think they can get away with in order to make a buck, no matter the consequences to society. This is what inevitably happens when economic power is concentrated into the hands of a few powerful people.

Now, tell me again how workers are supposed to trust each other less (or at least no more) than they can trust the executives currently calling all the shots.

No, but it's an unstoppable evolution.

AI is used more and more in warfare. In the current Gaza war it's generating targets.

https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.



Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

AI used as a tool to commit genocide.



AI can also be used to determine how much damage has been caused so far


Satellite analysis by researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center and Oregon State University estimate that between 26% and 34% of all structures in the strip have been damaged as of November 29. Comparatively, those figures were between 20% and 26% on November 18. In the Gaza and North Gaza governorates, where the heaviest concentration of airstrikes has occurred, an estimated 52% to 65% of structures have been damaged.