Are we gonna get a cure for cancer and other devastating ailments? Because if AI gives us that, I'll let it destroy the workplace and boil the oceans. If not, I may be part of the crowd that goes to arson the data centers and hang the barons, when that day comes.

> Work brings dignity and purpose to people’s lives.

Speak for yourself! For me, and in my experience many others, work is a necessary evil. I’ve experienced more indignities in the workplace than anywhere else (though fortunately not as consistently as some people), and the thought of work being my life’s purpose is too bleak to entertain. I’m very happy for those who have a more positive experience, but some of us don’t fit so well.

Dooming the workplace is peter thiel's stated position, as he attempts to crash the currency to better control the future corporate economy

But we all went back to the office 5 days a week? Surely we are too valuable to replace!

I love how myopic the knee-jerk reactions to these pleas of modesty and decency tend to be.

"If AI replaces all jobs, none of us will have to work!" Alright, let's extrapolate a bit.

Society is currently organized around working to survive. AI suddenly replaces all work. How do people survive?

"Well everything will just be free now" Will it? Will the Capitalists who built these systems and replaced that labor now suddenly just give away product? Housing? Food? Care?

"Well, we'll just have to reconfigure society!" I mean, yeah, sure, obviously that'll have to happen. Will the Capitalists who empower the current systems of governance now cede said power when work is no longer available but still necessary to survive?

"Oh, well, people need to cooperate then, speak up for themselves, take action now." I don't disagree, and I think these sorts of Op-Eds, the "AI Doomers" making pleas for decency and civility in comments sections, the artisans demanding compensation for the theft of their work, and the myriad of folks who recognize the pace we're on will get people killed - nevermind the folks highlighting AI's disproportionate use in mass surveillance, genocide, and inflicting harm on "undesirables - are doing exactly that: speaking up, taking action, and attempting proactive reform.

"But they're hindering AI!" That's the fucking point you colossal numpty. The point is to slow it down so we have time to adapt.

Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.

Smash the looms, people before profit!

If it can be automated, it will be, and there is no avoiding it, since the people with the robots and the automation care only about profit, nothing more.

We, little people, are merely annoyances, and the sooner they can be done with us, the better.

It's less "gloomy" and more of a passionate "Hey, we need to rework the social order anyway, so can we maybe not set everything on fire before we do so?"

Nobody's disagreeing with your latter line, just vehemently screaming that there's no need for willful harm.

Several issues with this:

1. Economic change drives social change. The political will to create something like UBI will not exist unless there is mass unemployment.

2. Right now we need people to work, in order to create the things they need to live. It will not be possible to allow willful unemployment until machines can actually do most jobs.

3. We don't actually know if 100% automation will happen. Past automation has tended to create new jobs, and we've maintained full employment at higher wages. We should see if this happens again before we start panicking.

We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.

> We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go.

Get that accelerationist fatalism outta my face. Just because you personally have no qualms with harming others in the name of some facsimile of progress, doesn't mean it's the only option available to us. Slowing things down through regulations, through employment mandates, through pleas for cooperation instead of immediate replacement, all of those and more are ways of gradual reform and adaptation.

We're proposing letting the organism (humanity) adapt to traditional work and employment being wholesale eliminated in a society that demands work for basic survival through gradual and continuous reforms as circumstances change. Your proposal is the functional equivalent of telling an endangered species, "lol get gud bruv".

We are not the same.

The hope is that society will turn into Banks' "Culture."

The reality is that it'll probably turn into Idiocracy.

The race is to make Bank’s culture a reality doesn’t have to depend entirely on human ability. It’s a race to create the minds before we’re too dumb to do so.

Most people in this econonic system have to work to earn a wage in order to pay for their living. That combined with large swathes of people being made redundant and not able to earn said wage is gonna be a problem.

No they won't. You're missing the other half; if labor becomes free, the fruits of that labor become exceedingly cheap or even free.

See: the rapid drop in cost of food, manufactured goods, etc as automation took over those sectors. No one starved when we automated farming; they got fat.

> if AI replaces work wholesale right now billions of people will die before society is reshaped accordingly.

Don't worry, the economists will slap the label "natural readjustment of labour supply levels" on this phenomenon, and it will make everything morally better.

Keep everyone precarious and fearful, stringing together multiple bullshit jobs to make the rent, always one car repair or health scare away from the abyss. Let owners/exploiters suppress the wages they pay workers while allowing owners/exploiters to relentlessly raise the prices workers pay owners/exploiters.

Then say "there is no alternative", our civilization is predicated on systematic exploitation to survive, and if you try to change it "everyone will die".

The owner/exploiter class is going to replace labor with capital like they always have.

The worker's enemy isn't the thing that eliminates work, the worker's enemy is is the owner/exploiter who weaponizes automation in their class war.

Reminds me of a review (written somewhere in the early 60s, I believe) by some Soviet sci-fi writer of Hamilton's Star Kings (1949) and the Western sci-fi in general; to paraphrase, "it's astonishing that those writers would set their decorations thousands years in the future, with wildly imaginative technological advances and inventions, yet when they come to the social systems, all they can imagine is either the feudal order of the past, or the modern style of capitalism".

Original title: AI must augment rather than replace us or human workers are doomed

The article does not mention the workplace as the editorialized title would imply. It's primarily about trade unions.

There will be new constraints where humans can fill the gaps. But, who knows if that'll be enough.