AI and the economy

[pood]

Maybe this is better in the Social Science forum.

I keep reading how AI is going to take all our jobs, not just mental labor but physical labor as well when it is successfully incorporated into nimble robots. I was just reading a thumbsucker from CBS online about “gradual disempowerment,” the idea that AI will soon make us all useless and feel useless as well.

So, AI will write novels and poetry, digitally paint pictures, make lawyers, accountants, and doctors obsolete, and when wedded to robots AI will serve beer in bars, serve as barbacks, do all sorts of heavy manual labor, construction work, probably have sex for us, and on and on.

I don’t think any of this will happen. But suppose it does.

What the long CBS thumbsucker never addresses is what I wanted to learn about most of all: If AI wipes out all our jobs, both mental and physical, who will have any money to pay for goods and services that AI will miraculously provide?

I realize billionaires are greedy bastards who hate all the poors, but as soon as no one can afford any of the goods and services that AI provides they won’t be billionaires for very long, or even thousandaires.

 

[bigfield]

They could just sell stuff to each other.

Without a worker class they would stop mass producing the consumer goods that workers buy, and pivot to making robots and space yachts.

 

[TV and credit cards]

On the whole, it will be a better more abundant world without all of us breathers sucking up all the resources the multitrillionaires want for their own enjoyment. I mean, you don't really expect them to go live on Mars, do you? I fear the Nerd Reich to come, that is here now.

 

[DBT]

Who knows, maybe it'll come to mobs with pitchforks and torches storming mansions and gated communities.

 

[Elixir]

Who knows, maybe it'll come to mobs with pitchforks and torches storming mansions and gated communities.

Could be mobs with laptops causing missed deliveries of critical toys.

 

[ZiprHead]

AI just found this world wide PHP vulnerability.

PHP: What is it and why did it spark a global cyber security scramble?

AI uncovered long-hidden programming flaws, triggering a rare global cyber-security response.

www.bbc.com

 

[bilby]

AI is apparently a highly useful tool for finding security flaws in software.

Whether that is a good thing depends in part on who is weilding it, and their motives.

Certainly it is causing a lot of flaws to become known very fast, which is probably better for the black-hats than for the white-hats - as a criminal, you only need to find one open door, while as a society we need everyone to be dilligent in securing every one of those doors as soon as they are found to be open. There's always some system somewhere that didn't get patched.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If AI lives up to the hype we will have to go to some sort of either universal income or subsidized jobs program. I favor the latter as the former is a potential deadly trap--if the situation changes and society needs them to work it will be much harder to recover from a situation where most people don't know how to work.

However, I would be very surprised if we reach that point. The only good uses we see of AI so far are cases where you don't need to count on it. Like the exposing security flaws--finding flaws is good. Trust an AI that all have been found? NOPE. Or the one that keeps showing up in her WeChat feed: used to be an attractive woman giving a short English lesson on half a dozen or so related words (or sometimes expressions). Now it's marked as AI and it's a little girl doing it. No, the mouth movement is too much and if you watch you can see the repetition of head movement. I'm sure the words are human, the girl's face is AI. Doesn't matter that the girl isn't perfect.

 

[bilby]

If AI lives up to the hype we will have to go to some sort of either universal income or subsidized jobs program. I favor the latter as the former is a potential deadly trap--if the situation changes and society needs them to work it will be much harder to recover from a situation where most people don't know how to work.

Wait, what?

Do you honestly think that people who don't work for money will not do work, or will somehow lose even the knowledge of what working is?

That's absurd. Unpaid work fills a large fraction of the waking time people spend outside of paid work.

Most people do housework (for zero pay) a lot of the time, even when they have a paid job; Retirees do plenty of such work.

Everyone will know how to work. There is a "risk" that they might stop being so keen to tolerate bullshit from bosses, but that's not the disaster you might think - productivity can be readily achieved without horrific working conditions, (though this fact is a closely guarded secret in the USA).

A universal basic income would not only be great for humanity, but likely also for the economy too. There's a reason why every player in the game of Monopoly starts with a non-zero amount of cash that is just handed to them for no reason. The game cannot even begin until every player has at least some money.

Money primarily acts as a signal to the economy about what is in demand. That signal cannot be sent by people who have no money. A minimal universal income for everyone would be an excellent idea. It would be inflationary, but that inflation can easily and simply be offset by an progressive increase in income taxation.

Of course, the big "problem" with such a scheme is that it would deny wealthy people a pool of very cheap labour. We would need to either automate, or pay very well for, drudgery. How terrifying.