Technology

Thing is... if you are an artist that creates art because creating new things is the fun part to you, what do you do when AI can do everything you can but better and faster with no real input from you? This isnt even about making a living at that point but that the thing you chose to put all that work into, is now effectively something you dont meaningfully contribute to.

And lets be honest, this is capitalism were talking about. Do you really think the rich fucks that benefit from this are going to willingly share that extra productivity with the workers they displace? Or that the government is going to effectively handle the economic transition? Because productivity has been skyrocketing for years but wages havent.

People have this idea that AI could free us from needing to work but forget all the advances that increased productivity over and over that never lifted the burden. Back decades ago if you told someone that we were as productive as we are today, theyd expect that we worked 20 hours a week and lived luxuriously but in reality most people work at least 40 and barely scrape by. The situation is worse for anyone whose craft was made irrelevant by new technology. Good news! Your job isnt necessary. Bad news! Capitalism still expects you to "pull your weight" like it always has.

Every time something disruptive like this came about it effectively relegated whatever that was replaced to a small niche but in the case of AI, there is really nothing that you can do that it in principle cant. There isnt really a niche you will fit into at some point whether its your job or a hobby. If you are like me and enjoy creating things that have never been created before, youre done. AI can eventually create a million new things by the time you create one... that it already effectively made hundreds of thousands of iterations ago.

For AI to do what people are hoping it does, things have to play out differently this time than they have ever played out in history. The productivity gains have to match income. Inflation has to either be at or below the rate that income increases. And you have to find out how to tackle the fact that AI wont replace everyone all at once, it'll do so sequentially. So the guy that used to be able to make a living drawing stuff, whose hobby and job overlapped, is now going to have to take out garbage instead because AI hasnt made robots cheap enough to replace them yet. Yet being the key word, eventually the only people that would have work are people that either manipulate or maintain the AI doing all of the work that remains and even that gets replaced at some point. All the while the value of peoples' labor drops like a stone because AI can do whatever you can do with nothing more than electricity and occasional maintanence. No need for sleep, no need to eat or medical care, no family to support, no desire to travel or have recreation, the perfect worker.

The issue ultimately is that AI requires that we smoothly transition from a mostly capitalist system to a mostly socialist system without the zone of pain between them. And thats just the economic side of it.