This isn't like other tech revolutions. You will have all the free time you want perhaps ... because you'll be useless at some point and no one will care about your art either as everyone will be able to create any art with AI. 

You'll be solely reliant on the state. 

Communism or something like it for most people. 

If Chess and Go are the precedent, this won't be the case. People still enjoy watching, playing, and competing in Chess and Go despite AI systems being superior to humans for a while now (almost 30 years in the case of Chess.) 

A lot of recreational art isn't digital, and really AI seems to be on path to replace art products (basically image generation as an occupation for content output that has another use) more than recreational art. 

Well, I never bought the idea of an "end of history". To be fair, I never read Fukuyama's book and the actual claims are softer than the title implies. But still, going by Wikipedia:

"Fukuyama argues that history should be viewed as an evolutionary process, and that the end of history, in this sense, means that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations."

He days history follows an evolutionary process, but natural evolution never reaches an end-point, never settles, it always moves on. If he draws this comparison, he should've seen this. Also I think baked in is the idea that evolution follows a path or something, which isn't true. Evolutionary processes try out a lot and can move in unexpected direction, even seemingly "backwards".

In the context of history I think we look for stable societal and governmental structures, and I think China established an alternative model for stability. Because stability is not so much about the freedom of choice for individuals and legitimizing election processes. I think if the majority of people lives in good enough circumstances they will not challenge the government and thus society is stable.

We have also to see, that democratic societies don't actually exist that long in history and even then aren't always as stable. As I german I like to keep reminding people that the NSDAP and Hitler were elected in free election in germany. The problem wasn't liberty and democracy, it was that the economic crisis left people in bad circumstances, the governments tried to put most of the burden on poor people and the more they felt left out, the more willing they were to burn everything down. This is also a reason I think that most countries moved towards fascism in that time, except the US, that had policies that balanced the burdens of the economic crisis more equally. A reason the US today is spinning out so much nowadays I see as well in their shitty system that leaves way too many people out in bad conditions, while rich and powerful people are thriving. I feel that can't go well.

Well, that might not be completely true anymore. This video was an eye-opener for me and kinda scary. It means, that an big economy can already mostly operate on only the most wealthy 10%. Which is not great. Because the powerful and rich will not feel as much need anymore to satisfy the need of the poor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2OHjHPkUzM

To circle back to the Culture for a moment: I remember this scene, where someone was maintaining a rest point. They were asked why they do it, if a drone can do as well, and they answered because it made them feel good. This is the important part: the Culture also doesn't need the majority of people for the economic functioning of the system. But the wealth produced by the system is still shared with the people.

Our current system does link wealth distribution to economic participation (aka work), but that is just not working anymore, with or without AI, simply because the economy got more and more effective and will keep doing so, reducing the need of bodies to function. We need a new wealth distribution system, because if we keep relying on the market, we will slide into mass poverty (or actually already starting to) and this destabilizes societies as the people are losing their faith in the system and are more and more willing to utilize extreme actions.

You can also look into history at things like photography. Drawing was at some point used in the way photography became, for instance people made family portraits. With photograpohy the art changed and artists moved to more abstract drawing styles. There is value in being creative and people recognize this. I think though that you cannot expect as much payment, but more art as an hobby that you actually invest in. But that will never go out of use, because people need creative outlets, regardless if they are paid for them or not.

The top 10% by household income includes (in fact is majority composed of) professional-managerial class people who are going to lose their jobs first because their labor is the most expensive and out-modeable with AI, and probably they can only partially live on investments. I am in that class and income bracket (95 percentile according to an income calculator I just entered in) and expect to be out of a job within the next five years at the latest if I don't do a career pivot that requires at least a partial physical component that AI can't perform yet.  

Actually, I think anybody who does any manual or social labor will be a bit safer due to institutional inertia and the fact that robotics hasn't been accelerating as fast as AI/has hit a plateau. Although world models can help with that. But even they will be affected because if the professional-managerial class, which is the class that spends the most in proportion to their wealth (more than capitalists) loses their jobs, then they're going to be spending less on the products and services that the working class produces, and aggregate demand will slump all around. 

Anyway, almost every social revolution in developed(ish) countries in the last three centuries has happened because a very angry upper-middle class has been displaced or locked out of the political-economy. I don't think if the top 10% (minus capitalists who are mostly the .01%+) lose their jobs that there won't be political and economic reckoning. 

I agree 100% with the culture commentary, I think it and other post-scarcity fiction will be helpful for the transition away from workerist/productionist culture, especially in very Calvinistic societies like the U.S. 

I don’t know if that’s supposed to make me feel intimidated? I expect and hope that UBI will become a reality at some point. Certainly, it would be preferable if AI would produce life necessities like food and housing rather than code and art, but we have to start somewhere. 

One of the most enduring and iconic scenes in cinema regarding technological advancement for the sake of profit was the classic lunch scene from Jurassic Park:

John Hammond and his scientists discovered they could clone dinosaurs, and the first thing Hammond sought to do with it was create a zoo. He didn't see anything profound. He saw a business opportunity and could not wait to profit off of this new technology. Because of his hubris, dozens of people were killed in multiple incidents. Fiction is replete with examples of corporations and individual businessmen even worse than Hammond and InGen, doing horrific things just to make a buck (Weyland-Yutani comes to mind: "Priority one: Ensure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable."), but the world of fiction does often draw from real life and what we see in cinema is often not much different from reality.

Fast-forward to the 2020s and in that reality where we reside Silicon Valley tech guys invented a new form of machine learning, not for the betterment of humanity but because they saw a business opportunity and could not wait to profit off of this new technology, consequences be damned. And the consequences will damn us all if things keep going this way.

Every single for-profit corporation would, if they could, replace every single worker with a machine, and LLMs/"A.I." offer a major opportunity to do that. The great contradiction of capitalism is that the capitalist class needs consumers to buy its products, but it doesn't want actual workers. Labor is a drain on their bottom line, and so they seek to reduce those overhead costs if not outright eliminate it. Why pay someone $25 an hour when you can offshore their job and have a sweatshop worker do the same job for $25 a week? Why pay a cashier when you can convince your customers to do that work themselves for free? And that's to say nothing of the long and horrific history of the use of slave labor by for-profit businesses, which is something that still exists to this very day.

But why even bother dealing with humans at all when you can replace their workers with robots? In addition to LLMs, prototypes for fully-automated restaurants and retail establishments exist. Every single one of us is at risk of being replaced by a machine of some kind. Machines aren't sentient. They don't need to be paid wages or given benefits. They'll never show up late. They'll never need bathroom or meal breaks. They'll never need days off for personal reasons. They'll never unionize. They won't question orders. They won't get pissed off. They won't get happy, they won't get sad, they won't laugh at your jokes. They just run programs.

Of course, nobody stops to answer the question "And then what?" What happens when large swathes of the population become permanently unemployable? How will they be able to buy the goods & services that our entire economy subsists off of? Universal basic income? Sure. Sounds great. One problem. Who's going to pay for it? The vast pool of obsolete people can't. They're not taxpayers anymore. The burden of taxation will have to increasingly fall on the shoulders of the capitalist class, yet they've been fighting tooth and nail for decades to eliminate any tax liabilities. As far as they're concerned, as titans of industry and gods among men, they are entitled to not have to pay taxes. Taxes are for the plebeians to pay.

Then there's the other destructive aspects of "A.I." The environmental impact of these massive data centers and the resources they consume should not be underestimated, and water scarcity and climate change will be exacerbated by these power-hungry technologies. Demand for electricity will skyrocket, and as a result prices will likely rise at unsustainable rates and our already strained grids will be put under greater pressure. Massive power bills and rolling blackouts are possible in the not too distant future. And then there's the fact that "A.I." chatbots are literally driving people crazy.

Its most well-known use, so-called "A.I. art," is also destructive to human creativity and threatens to potentially end entire lines of work involving said creativity. This isn't like the elimination of other types of jobs throughout history. This strikes as something at the very core of humanity. We have been making art for art's sake for tens of thousands of years, long before the first civilizations arose. But the problem with the entertainment industry is that, well, it's an industry. Every major film studio, record label, game publisher, etc., is a publicly-traded company concerned only with growing their profits. The arts & entertainment became big business, and therefore the bottom line matters more than the art itself. Like any other business, every single person employed by big studios & publishers is a drain on the bottom line. The executives and shareholders long for the day when they no longer have to pay artists, actors, writers, musicians, authors, directors, and so on, and where computers can produce entire songs, TV shows, movies, books, paintings, etc., by themselves with minimal human input. Now that they have what is basically Plagiarism Bot 3000 at their disposal, they have just what they've always wanted.

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, valued solely by their ability to generate profit. Every manipulative, underhanded scumbag move the likes of Bobby Kotick or David Zaslav ever did was for the sake of profit, and there's countless others like them throughout the entertainment industry. They think "being an artist/actor/author/musician" is something that should only exist as a hobby, not a line of work, because they don't want to have to sign a paycheck to an actual human being. That any of them actually release anything with any real merit is only because of the hard work of the actual creatives and other people who help produce art and entertainment, and because things that are actually good do still make lots of money. Yet the suits want to kick all of those people to the curb. They don't care that they wouldn't have their vast empires without the hard work of their employees, nor do they care how unethical it is to plagiarize the entire history of human creativity. And they are absolutely banking on the general public not caring, either.

Hell, there's already plenty of people in the general public who are just so full of pure spite that they would absolutely love to see a great many people in the performing arts lose their jobs. Thing is, it's not just the "Hollywood elites" that would lose their livelihoods. So would the veritable armies of people you see in the credits of every movie, show, and game. The gaffers/electricians, grips, cinematographers, boom operators, prop modelers, costume makers, makeup artists, VFX personnel, audio engineers, stunt performers, and so on would end up in the unemployment line alongside the directors, writers, and actors, replaced by some thoughtless dipshit in a suit typing things into a prompt and hoping the general public will eat up whatever soulless slop the plagiarism machine regurgitates. These companies only view their customers as marks to exploit, just wallets with redundant sacks of meat attached to them. 

And this particular use of "A.I." is also destructive to the very ability for human beings to trust anything. There was already a serious trust deficit beforehand as politicians and pundits tried to undermine trust in everything that didn't align with their interests (see the major success of anti-science propaganda on the political right). We already have government officials using photographs and videos produced or doctored by "A.I." for propaganda and misinformation purposes. The implications of this are already the stuff of nightmares... unless you're a fascist, in which case it's a dream come true. And as it turns out, one of the biggest pushers of "A.I." is a fascist and who bought a social media company because his feelings got hurt and proceeded to not only run it into the ground, to not only use his own personal account to signal boost white nationalists and Nazis, but also to hawk his own "A.I." brand that's currently being used to generate revenge porn and CSAM.

This technology would have been fine if capitalism didn't exist. Then again, if capitalism didn't exist then this technology probably wouldn't exist because "line must go up" would not be the primary driving force of the economy. "A.I." exists purely to benefit executives and shareholders. It serves little in the way of any practical use to the average person. It's not something that should be the dominating force of our economy. Even if it is a bubble that bursts and fizzles away and those long-term consequences don't manifest, it will still possibly be catastrophic to the economy in the short term. Because this bullshit exists in the first place, we're screwed either way. All because a bunch of rich bastards thought they found their latest get-rich-quick scheme and now the sunk-cost fallacy has come into play, as has the need for egocentric billionaires to save face.

Absent any sort of moderating influence, the profit motive necessarily compels people to act as unscrupulously as possible. Basic human avarice is a know quantity that should make us all perpetually aware of this basic fact. Morality cannot be part of the equation in capitalism. Only ever-growing profits. While hurting people may not be the goal of capitalism, its ruthless drive for profit inevitably leads it to do harmful things because doing the right thing is rarely profitable in and of itself. History is replete with examples of horrible things done in the name of profit, from human rights abuses (see where the phrase "banana republic" originated) to ignoring all sorts of negative externalities (see the harms caused by fossil fuels, tobacco, lead compounds used in paint & gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, automobiles, various industrial processes, etc.) to any of countless other forms of abuse and negligence. And at every turn they fought any sort of regulation that might reign them in, because it was more profitable to abuse, exploit, and pollute. The likes of Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and

Relevant video that dropped within the last 24 hours from a YT channel I'm subscribed to:

They figured this out NOW?!!