A.I. and a Post-Labor Economy

[Emerald]

In the past, I had been contemplating about if there are any other forms of economic system that falls outside of the Capitalism vs Socialism umbrellas. And it was previously difficult for me to fathom of something totally new economically.

But given the recent rise in A.I. technology, I can see some writing on the wall that will likely be rife with problems but also has the potential to bringing humanity more into alignment with the underlying principle of unconditional validity.

Take this as food for thought, because I (of course) don't know if this will happen.

But I suspect that A.I. will likely replace 60%+ of human jobs... and in fairly short order. 

And if this happens, this will create a dynamic where large swaths of the population are unemployed. This will come rife with problems like a widening gap between rich and poor. And there would likely be a rise of eugenics campaigns, genocides, and other deliberate forms of population control.

But if we are able to rise to the challenge, I believe we will begin asking ourselves the question, "What is the true function of an economic system?"

Currently, (whether we're talking about Capitalism or Socialism), the way we think about economics is that it's a way of disseminating value based off of the labor a worker puts in.

So, Capitalism is where the owners of a business owns the means of production and gives the worker of portion of the value that they bring in.

And the ideal within Socialism is where the workers own the means of production and keeps the entirety of the value of their labors.

Both of these philosophies inextricably tie together the concept of labor in exchange for value. 

But, the reality is that an economic system is a tool. It's a complex tool... but a tool nonetheless. And the function of that tool isn't to disseminate value based on labor across the human populace.

It's a tool to disseminate value across the human populace, period.

And with the rise in AI and the loss of human labor, the best possible outcome that I can see happening (though it would also be a huge collective existential crisis at best because we equate the value of our being with our doing) is that we start fathoming of how a post-labor economy functions.

And instead of thinking about people getting what they want and need based off of how much their labor value earns them... we instead start thinking about people getting what they want and need simply because they exist.

If these things come to fruition, I see this collective paradigm shift away from the notion of earning/deserving based off of labor value... and towards unconditional bestowment based off of the inherent validity of one's being as 100% necessary to avoid the looming problems of A.I.

Just some food for thought. What do you think?

[aurum]

@Emerald This was essentially the premise of Andrew Yang's 2020 presidential campaign, and why he wanted to enact UBI.

I think the most ideal outcome is what you're describing: AI comes in, automates a bunch of jobs that humans quite frankly shouldn't be doing anyway, and frees humanity up to care about higher developmental values.

The question is whether or not we can actually pull that off. Or does it descend into degenerate corporatism, exploitation, loss of meaning and chaos for society? Perhaps some of both? How ready are the people of society to truly evolve?

Honestly I don't really know.

Jon Stewart did a piece of AI not that long ago:

 

I think he somewhat missed the mark on this one. His priority here is that the working-class doesn't get exploited and lose their jobs / meaning, which is reasonable. People will suffer if that happens. But how do you get to a society based on higher developmental values? People cannot just continue to toil in wage-slavery forever, even if it gets them the paycheck they need to survive. At some point we need to move past that.

Reasonable thinking would suggest there are going to be pros and cons. Some of it will be ugly, some of it will be beneficial. Long-term I'm optimistic we are heading for a society based on higher development, but the short-term is always unpredictable. 

[ExplorerMystic]

@Emerald You've articulated it beautifully . Most of the low tier job. Lets take an example of analyst from fresher to mid level in Finance sector . Generative AI / LLM module specifically designed for this sector will reduce the number of analyst required in future. Let say instead of 100 only 10 people will be required to do the same job . That's where it seems to be heading .

AI intelligence depend on quality of Training Data . For LLM (Large language module) in my view it has crossed 1st generation (this is just the way i put it) for text to text response. For other area Text to video or audio , specific areas such as finance , healthcare etc.  It is picking up the pace.

Shift is happening right now as most of the company are starting to re-structure or directing attention towards it. How it will unfold nobody had a clear picture.

Here is an insightful discussion on AI and Quantum Computing.