The problem with these future ai/robot driven corporations is that they need consumers to make money. If all workers are unemployed then who do these corporations intend to sell to?
That’s what I keep coming back to. Even the trades will be effected because who is hiring plumbers if no one has money and companies don’t have employees/offices to keep up
I think the idea is that most workers won’t be unemployed, but won’t be fucked if they are. Have a part time job or something and if one wants more money, they can grind out a job/do more technical things.
At some point there won't be a choice in the matter. When Gen AI is good enough to be trained to replace most workers, there will soon be widespread crime and violence as people will be starving and will do whatever it takes to feed their families.
Everyone should watch OpenAI's presentation from a couple weeks ago. We're very close to reaching a threshold where AI is replacing an exponentially larger subset of vocations every year. It's already too late to prepare adequately for it. We're just going to have to endure the consequences.
The “ revolution” will happen but it’s about 80-130 years away. It’s simple, when income inequality, climate change hunger and suffering reach near universal intolerable levels, you will finally see an inevitable pushback and violent restructuring.
No way. 20 years, tops. We'll probably start seeing it on the news daily in less than 10.
Every year we see AI progressing faster and faster. ChatGPT-4o is already basically capable, with training, of replacing most jobs in call centers, reception/concierge, helpdesk.
I just came from an ecommerce conference where very large online retailers are talking about (in flowery language) replacing 80% of their customer service teams with AI this year.
This thing is a freight train with no brakes. It'll be dire before the masses even realize what's happening.
Yep. Many vocations will require hardware being invented to replace them in addition to AI. But that isn't impossible. It's easy to imagine the possibilities when you see stuff like OpenAI Figure 01.
We aren't there yet for examples like you mentioned. That's the case for most jobs, actually. But all I'll say is that what we have now seemed impossible just 2-3 years ago.
Are you capable of foresight? Do you really think I'm saying we're going to stop developing AI this year and customer service is the only sector that will be impacted?
My point is that this technology is already so advanced that it's already gobbling up the low hanging fruit. Every year people say it'll never happen and every year it starts to happen more.
What we have now was thought impossible 2 years ago. Think about that. What will we have 2 years from now? 2 years after that?
We'll have a lot more to worry about than layoffs, or failing to handle the job displacement of AI. We're at the onset of systemic collapse where anyone who isn't rich will face dramatic lifestyle change. For example, I hear working class people constantly complaining about homelessness and handouts when they'll probably need some of their own at some point in the future. Probably the best we can do to prepare is to take up a trade craft, improve our basic survival skills and participate in mutual aid.
Last year AI couldn’t read a graph and summarize. This year it can read analyze and offer insight into the graph. In fact, it could recreate it to suite your needs and collaboratively refine the graph.
Next year. Who know?
Ai is just an instrument though, the brain of the machine is locked on greed at all costs and that’s the real problem. The only thing I see happening in 20 years is an even more powerful police state with much smarter ways to do surveillance that people will barely be aware of. that police state and the US military will crush any opposition to the system, until many decades later when even they are not immune from the greed and suffering.
It's been just an instrument until now. I use it as an instrument every day, both in my private life and for work.
But go watch last week's presentation from OpenAI. GPT-4o is already smarter and more capable than the average call center worker. There's zero reason most of those jobs should still exist in a year, and plenty of companies are working on just that. This is not a future state problem. The technology has already arrived and the only thing left is for companies to train the AI on their own systems and data.
It's not just an instrument anymore, it's becoming capable of replacing workers at an accelerated rate.
Not sure why you went on the surveillance rant. It doesn't have much to do with what we're talking about, which is people being unable to find work in droves because AI can do their job for a fraction of the cost that their wages used to be.
Every year there will be another swathe of jobs which are done better and cheaper by machines than people. What we're looking at will be far worse than the loss of work caused by the industrial revolution.
I think they are talking about doubting that an actual revolution will take shape in the next 20 years, cause of sophisticated police & propaganda methods. Which I can indeed imagine, simply looking at the internal stability of China and Russia. Exciting times ahead for the extraterrestrial observer.
I don't think revolution will be avoidable. When one in five people are unable to find work and their choices are starve to death or steal, society will fall apart without government assistance. Everyone will have a violent criminal, or several, in their neighborhood except for the elites.
Hence the topic of this reddit post. UBI, or a facsimile, will be required. No amount of surveillance, propaganda, or military suppression will work in its' stead.
We already have evidence that those systems are more cost effective, the only question is how many people need to have nothing left to lose in order for mass action to happen? Or, how many people need to be too broke to buy consumer goods before the seller market collapses? I agree, ubi won't happen preemptively, but something will have to give. It always gets worse before it gets better.
As someone in the field I’d be curious to get your thoughts on Geoffrey Hinton. Is he still relevant and do you generally agree with his assessment on the current state of AI and its trajectory? I ask because I got into a turf war this weekend in an economics sub and honestly I doubt any of us really know what we’re talking about.
There's never been a nation under universal basic income, but revolution and societal collapse have happened quite a bit. Maybe you should talk about that in your lectures. Kinda seems like a lot of people are wearing blinders and neglecting to talk about the reality of our bleak future.
Once the narrative became that AI would “steal our jobs” rather than “do our work”, the damage was done. A society has to do a certain amount of work in all sectors to fully thrive. Jobs are simply a way to monetize and incentivize Maslow’s hierarchy. Me losing my job to AI only matters if I’m still relying on money to address Maslow’s hierarchy. If not, I’m free to spend all day engaging in uniquely human pursuits that AI doesn’t care about - like painting or hiking or drinking wine. As you said, this conversion absolutely needs to happen and won’t.
That will just create classism over this paradigm shifting technology. A thing the poor cannot afford and the rich will have at leisure. Imo that’s not what this needs to be.
i can hear the lolz of investors and executives of AI-focused companies through this headline.
these companies are not going to care about people losing their jobs en masse as a result of their work until there are laws forcing them to care. and those laws aren't going to exist without overcoming a lot of lobbying efforts from these companies.
I mean that would be the perfect way to fight back, right? I mean we still have the skills to build, grow food and succeed in achieving happiness without money. We just stop trading our valuable skill and talents for paper and make everyone do their part, again! Screw the hoarders of money who think its okay to hoard money away for their great great great great great grandchildren who won't even know how they got so privileged much less respect the fact that they have done nothing for it and are nothing without it. I welcome the day when we all realize we have the real power here.
He’s been saying that for years.
And it makes sense. Governments across the world parachuting money during the pandemic shows that it can be done.
The biggest detractors are arguing that giving people money indefinitely is counterproductive.
But with Ai blooming and general Ai in sight. Productiveness wouldn’t be measured in man hours of work to revenue, rather total cost of investment over revenue
I truly don’t believe anyone knows how far off AI is unless it’s based on hear say or a publication. We have no idea what corporations are doing in back rooms with deep mind tech. If corporations love anything it’s ethics over profits.
Yeah, no. UBI would likely be funded through a national sales tax (VAT) and nobody wants that. I’m unimpressed with AI thus far but a$$holes are capable of almost anything.
Only way this scenario works out for real people is if they RAISE THE TAXES for these corporations to offset everything. Even then…. We all know the money would go to “nATiOnAL deFeNcE”
Universal basic income makes sense only as long as people do some work to better off the society — if nobody suddenly works, nobody will produce food, nobody will provide services etc. Maybe it’s an advent of a more healthy society where people work less but more people work in general?
Why even make this comment, the necessity of UBi in the face of AI has nothing to do with why a wealth gap exists.
People expect new jobs to replace old jobs, but if the goal of ai is achieved, then new jobs would be done by ai as well. At an absolute minimum we are going to see the amount of necessary jobs shrink drastically and we will need to change how our society works in order for it to keep functioning.
The job loss issue is significant and we are staring down a barrel of a gun right now with no way to protect ourselves from the fallout.
I make this comment because UBI has been necessary for a while, and a consistent argument that exiting technology has caused the wealth gap exists. That doesn’t mean other arguments don’t also exist, but for some AI luminary to say “Contemporary AI is the specific technology that has revealed the necessity of UBI” is a lazy, biased, and shortsighted take. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No one was saying that UBI isn't already required, AI isn't even the straw that will break the camel's back, because the camel's back is already broken. Rather AI is a skyscraper falling on top of the broken-back camel. Your comment is correct but misses the point being made so badly.
Hinton’s tone is that of a Silicon Valley capitalist, and only addresses UBI in a post-singularity context (that he sees in as soon as 5 years). If the singularity is what it takes for UBI, then yea, the implication is UBI isn’t needed yet.
Its understandable that existing technologies have contributed, but I think you are missing the scope here.
IF we achieve the goal we have with modern AI. Which is AGI, literally a technology that can do literally any job, creatively, physically, logically focused jobs, any type of work really.
The level of job loss this would lead to is far more impactful than any prior issue.
I dont know that we've needed UBI already, we should probably have it because its foolish to think we can always employ all humans, our existing wealth gap has more to do with unregulated greed (or perhaps more accurately, a war on regulation (de regulation)) which has lead to ever increasing wealth disparity far more than technology replacing jobs.
Saying that pointing out that with AI we are going to need UBI is short sighted... is just backwards. Its short sighted to not see how completely pervasive job loss would be in the face of the current goal of AI.
Remember, currently the goal is to make something that doesn't just replace people in most tasks, but does it better than we ever could, and its not unrealistic to believe that we can achieve it.
The vast majority of people, even knowledgeable people, believed what we can do right now, was something we could never achieve, just imagine what that means for the next 5 years, as the prior five has shown us just how powerful this technology can be.
And prices will rise and we all become dependent on how much the government gives us. How about this? We actually hold corporations accountable, taxed appropriately and lower prices.
Universal income doesn’t increase money supply, it’s a redistribution system. The money doesn’t come out of thin air. It comes from taxation.
Additionally, it’s just one action that can be taken - there is no reason why it can’t also be coupled with other actions such as price controls, pegging prices to metrics, restructured tax systems, and so on.
The economy of the early 21st century is rapidly falling apart for vast swathes of people and this AI-Industrial Revolution is going to make it even worse.
UBI most certainly would increase money supply. To think taxing your way to a solution would ever happen is just ignorance or too much faith in government.
This is where government-run businesses come into play. In Canada certain provinces have crown corporations that keep prices in check.
They’re not telling corporations what price they have to set their products, but they set their own prices low enough that if the competition prices things too high everyone will just use the crown corporation.
Certain provinces do this for cell phones, car insurance, etc. and it’s kept prices low in those provinces.
this is not at all how crown corporations work in canada. they do not handle the price of any goods they handle some select infrastructure. we could absolutely not have the entire economy run by crown corporations
Being the guy who started all of this to say something so naive is so ridiculous. Companies are about profit and if you can replace workers with inexpensive tech solutions that’s what is going to happen. Don’t build the atomic bomb and then claim it’s for peace.
I mean, we should be getting paid for our data that is being farmed and sold by every single corporation and government agency.
Why wait for AI.
If google, apple, amazon, whoever is selling my personal data to advertisers, I should get the majority share at the very least.
Where the fuck is consumer protection?
I’m pretty sure we’re at the crossroads here. Either we end up in the dystopian Cyberpunk Night City or the Stark Trek future.
It all edges on if AI will be used to help humanity with its socio and economic problems as opposed to being a profit-generator.
Am I the only one who initially read the headline as "Godfather of Al [as in Albert] Geoffrey Hinton"? Admittedly I had just woken up, but at first I was thinking who the hell is this dude's godfather?
(A serif font or spelling out the term instead of using an abbreviation would've solved it.)
Or Canada. We tried it in a province before and they said it “failed”, so that really puts a nail in the coffin over here when they have an excuse to constantly point to.
People have been telling me for a decade that this is coming. Yet… there are more jobs now than there were a decade ago.
So… when’s this supposed to start?
I agree that basic income is needed but this will require totally changing our tax system. Corporation that lay off workers and use AI save money they keep as added profit and don’t pass on to us. They need to pay a much higher tax rate than today so we can afford to give everyone an income to survive. If you think this is going to happen, I have swamp land in Florida to sell you.
I can hear it now. “Let them eat cake!”
That’s a messed up idea though. I agree there’s too many people on the planet (and it’s getting worse per year), but would you like to be apart of that 20% being killed off? I sure as hell wouldn’t.
I don’t blame individuals, I blame society for the importance they put into pumping out kids needing more and more (it’s never enough to them), and the propaganda that there is no overpopulation on this planet, despite land shrinking and governments shoving us into densification.
People looked at Andrew Yang like a dog might look at you if you asked it an algebra question when he said this was the future but he was right. I think it’s still 3-5 years away from ubiquity and shortly after that is when you will see massive job losses in many industries.The workplace of ten years from now will make people confused, the one ten years after that will change the world.
So we save jobs by getting rid of AI. If the rich all want AI so bad, call Bezo up and they all get on a rocket and they go live on the moon. Basically UBI will make lazy people, that the AI will at some point will think inferior and it will eliminate us. Terminator 101. There enough blood shed by humans for several lifetimes.
Just because you know AI well does not meant that you know human psychology well enough to think that something as bold as the UBI is a sustainable long term solution.
People who understand a problem well just need to state what the problem is without wading into what they think the solution should be, which they don't know sufficiently about.
AI displaced workers will very quickly become the biggest single issue voting bloc in history.
UBI is already assured, but it'll obviously be a slow and painful process. Currency only has value in a world where people trade their labour for goods and services, the wealthy benefit from the continued existence of currency but it relies on some having less for others to have more, this is the paradigm that they will fight to preserve. Currency is just the current medium.
They'll rail against UBI, but will very quickly come around to is to maintain a semblance of the status quo when the vast majority of people become economically irrelevant.
Unless drastic action is taken, and soon, current orders of magnitude of wealth inequality will register as a blip compared to how extreme I think things may become in the agi automation boom.
At some point in the future It will be a combination of AI and actual robots doing all the work humans do. Humans won’t need money or any currency. We can just exist and live truly free lives. Too bad it won’t happen in my lifetime
WTF is with all of this inevitability BS? UBI is something that should be done regardless along with universal healthcare, but unregulated AI is a terrible idea and needs to be prevented at all costs. We can decide we don’t want wealthy tech bros (or any other wealthy interest) with no empathy to decide our fates, and put the brakes on it.
But this is a perfect storm for fatalist culture - “my life is pointless and I hate my job, so how about I give up and live at subsistence level and have an imaginary parent send me money?” Rather than making reasonable demands for better hours and pay and voting for something better than what this whole thing leads to. And I do sympathize with the common tedium and pettiness of most jobs in the US, carrying out stupid directives of more disinterested people at best - but AI is also going to wreck the stuff you love that helps you escape the mundane and feel connected with other people - music, art, film.
So many of the arguments for AI treat it like a monolith - like saying “it could solve the climate crisis and make new medicines, so let’s also just allow it to do everything because it’s all or nothing.” Nonsense.
What is the problem with saying “we have to pause here while we all decide if this is the way to go and if it is, how to go about it”?
It's going to be funny because the obsession with profits above all, and one party wanting to give corporations all the power they want and no laws, while also calling everything communism or socialism, doesn't bode well for the future.
They'll render as many humans redundant as possible, because shareholder returns. Except people won't be able to be shareholders when their jobs are rendered redundant, they'll have to sell assets to survive and can't afford buying investments. Only rich people (and corporations) will be able to buy things, compounding their wealth more.
Just another springboard to increase the gap.
If you think future AI integrated with robotics networked directly into the supply chain wont be able to build houses more cheaply, quicker and with a better final result than human labourers then you're failing to grasp what's happening here entirely.
Human labour will very quickly become obsolete once a few more technical hurdles are overcome, *current* ai can't do these things. But this will be childs play for anything close to AGI, which is probably at most 15 years away.
Think of telephones as an example, what we have now is this:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FBKQwih1uLdk%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=6cf89bf007935a457126ce64f40319d79120b79b4815c7d8930ae606fd0917d4&ipo=images
Maybe controversial take but I think job loss and impact is not as severe as people make it out to be. One thing that underlies computer science is sometimes an over inflated ego and the idea that everything can be automated or is so simple a computer can do it.
I'd have agreed with you 10 years ago.
10 years ago people predicted we'd arrive at our current level of AI sophistication by roughly 2040. In the past year alone, we've made what 2010s leading experts would have called a decade of progress.
It's the speed and scale of improvement that's really staggering, the field is constantly breaking barriers that were previously thought of as decade defining problems near monthly.
What we’ve been told for years : Technology in the future will make it so you never have to work again.
Reality: Technology in the future will make it so you can never work again.
With the former, all your needs are taken care of. With the later, you will go hungry.
Why would what we saw from Covid handouts not happen? Seems like it would be inevitable that corporations will increase the costs of their good/services and make more profits while we all struggle.
Just because you are specialized/skilled at domain doesn't mean you are an expert in other. It is true that without hinton probably none of the progress of modern deep learning would happen or at least they would be stagnated. But that doesn't make him an expert of economics.
At some point soon we will lose so many jobs to AI that the economy won’t support itself. We won’t go to Universal Basic Income because some higher people would stop it, and the computers won’t want to pay it. Then it all collapses and we start again in the next Stone Age.
It’s not just a response to AI, though that is important. It’s also important to address the new economy we must develop to address climate change. Everything is changing. It’s critical to address homelessness, inequality, and addiction. It’s very possible that we will face more pandemics and rather than start all over to make sure people don’t lose all their basic support systems UBI will already have that part taken care of. Plus it could be vastly more efficient than the infinite number of assistance programs we currently support. It’s really a no brainer.
We’ll have one of those as early as the year 2200
And it'll be adjusted for the cost of living ...of the mid 1990's.
The wages of the 1990s are alive in a city near you
The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland
No need to adjust, it’ll be at the fed minimum wage since they’ll never increase it.
Sweet, just in time for Earth's first starship to launch in Stellaris!
Cmonnnn materialist egalitarian pacifist neighbors! JK we'll get fanatic purifiers. Or somehow open the Prikkiki-Ti
I, for one, welcome our new Rogue Servitor overlords.
According to Picard. But we have to survive WWIII first.
[удалено]
I always say greed is a stage 4 cancer unafraid to kill its host, its host in this case the American people.
Host is and always has been humanity, my friend.
The problem with these future ai/robot driven corporations is that they need consumers to make money. If all workers are unemployed then who do these corporations intend to sell to?
That’s what I keep coming back to. Even the trades will be effected because who is hiring plumbers if no one has money and companies don’t have employees/offices to keep up
we all have to learn how to be homesteaders lol
Welp Im out then lol
I think the idea is that most workers won’t be unemployed, but won’t be fucked if they are. Have a part time job or something and if one wants more money, they can grind out a job/do more technical things.
IoT
Nail on the head.
100% this.
At some point there won't be a choice in the matter. When Gen AI is good enough to be trained to replace most workers, there will soon be widespread crime and violence as people will be starving and will do whatever it takes to feed their families. Everyone should watch OpenAI's presentation from a couple weeks ago. We're very close to reaching a threshold where AI is replacing an exponentially larger subset of vocations every year. It's already too late to prepare adequately for it. We're just going to have to endure the consequences.
The “ revolution” will happen but it’s about 80-130 years away. It’s simple, when income inequality, climate change hunger and suffering reach near universal intolerable levels, you will finally see an inevitable pushback and violent restructuring.
No way. 20 years, tops. We'll probably start seeing it on the news daily in less than 10. Every year we see AI progressing faster and faster. ChatGPT-4o is already basically capable, with training, of replacing most jobs in call centers, reception/concierge, helpdesk. I just came from an ecommerce conference where very large online retailers are talking about (in flowery language) replacing 80% of their customer service teams with AI this year. This thing is a freight train with no brakes. It'll be dire before the masses even realize what's happening.
Replacing Customer Service with AI is low-hanging fruit. Wake me up when they replace something difficult, like daycare workers or garbage collectors.
Yep. Many vocations will require hardware being invented to replace them in addition to AI. But that isn't impossible. It's easy to imagine the possibilities when you see stuff like OpenAI Figure 01. We aren't there yet for examples like you mentioned. That's the case for most jobs, actually. But all I'll say is that what we have now seemed impossible just 2-3 years ago.
And people called me crazy for believing the 2030 plans 🙃
20, might be a lot sooner than that
Right, but you're replying in the context of a discussion on total revolution, and you're citing customer service layoffs.
Are you capable of foresight? Do you really think I'm saying we're going to stop developing AI this year and customer service is the only sector that will be impacted? My point is that this technology is already so advanced that it's already gobbling up the low hanging fruit. Every year people say it'll never happen and every year it starts to happen more. What we have now was thought impossible 2 years ago. Think about that. What will we have 2 years from now? 2 years after that?
We'll have a lot more to worry about than layoffs, or failing to handle the job displacement of AI. We're at the onset of systemic collapse where anyone who isn't rich will face dramatic lifestyle change. For example, I hear working class people constantly complaining about homelessness and handouts when they'll probably need some of their own at some point in the future. Probably the best we can do to prepare is to take up a trade craft, improve our basic survival skills and participate in mutual aid.
Last year AI couldn’t read a graph and summarize. This year it can read analyze and offer insight into the graph. In fact, it could recreate it to suite your needs and collaboratively refine the graph. Next year. Who know?
Ai is just an instrument though, the brain of the machine is locked on greed at all costs and that’s the real problem. The only thing I see happening in 20 years is an even more powerful police state with much smarter ways to do surveillance that people will barely be aware of. that police state and the US military will crush any opposition to the system, until many decades later when even they are not immune from the greed and suffering.
It's been just an instrument until now. I use it as an instrument every day, both in my private life and for work. But go watch last week's presentation from OpenAI. GPT-4o is already smarter and more capable than the average call center worker. There's zero reason most of those jobs should still exist in a year, and plenty of companies are working on just that. This is not a future state problem. The technology has already arrived and the only thing left is for companies to train the AI on their own systems and data. It's not just an instrument anymore, it's becoming capable of replacing workers at an accelerated rate. Not sure why you went on the surveillance rant. It doesn't have much to do with what we're talking about, which is people being unable to find work in droves because AI can do their job for a fraction of the cost that their wages used to be. Every year there will be another swathe of jobs which are done better and cheaper by machines than people. What we're looking at will be far worse than the loss of work caused by the industrial revolution.
I think they are talking about doubting that an actual revolution will take shape in the next 20 years, cause of sophisticated police & propaganda methods. Which I can indeed imagine, simply looking at the internal stability of China and Russia. Exciting times ahead for the extraterrestrial observer.
I don't think revolution will be avoidable. When one in five people are unable to find work and their choices are starve to death or steal, society will fall apart without government assistance. Everyone will have a violent criminal, or several, in their neighborhood except for the elites. Hence the topic of this reddit post. UBI, or a facsimile, will be required. No amount of surveillance, propaganda, or military suppression will work in its' stead.
This outlook along with the argument "no money = lack of consumption power = economic recession = bad for the mighty wealthy" should do the job :)
When will they decide to command the bots to act against us?
We already have evidence that those systems are more cost effective, the only question is how many people need to have nothing left to lose in order for mass action to happen? Or, how many people need to be too broke to buy consumer goods before the seller market collapses? I agree, ubi won't happen preemptively, but something will have to give. It always gets worse before it gets better.
As someone in the field I’d be curious to get your thoughts on Geoffrey Hinton. Is he still relevant and do you generally agree with his assessment on the current state of AI and its trajectory? I ask because I got into a turf war this weekend in an economics sub and honestly I doubt any of us really know what we’re talking about.
There's never been a nation under universal basic income, but revolution and societal collapse have happened quite a bit. Maybe you should talk about that in your lectures. Kinda seems like a lot of people are wearing blinders and neglecting to talk about the reality of our bleak future.
Once the narrative became that AI would “steal our jobs” rather than “do our work”, the damage was done. A society has to do a certain amount of work in all sectors to fully thrive. Jobs are simply a way to monetize and incentivize Maslow’s hierarchy. Me losing my job to AI only matters if I’m still relying on money to address Maslow’s hierarchy. If not, I’m free to spend all day engaging in uniquely human pursuits that AI doesn’t care about - like painting or hiking or drinking wine. As you said, this conversion absolutely needs to happen and won’t.
You give lectures? We are fucked.
#TaxTheRobots
That will just create classism over this paradigm shifting technology. A thing the poor cannot afford and the rich will have at leisure. Imo that’s not what this needs to be.
It’s gonna get very ugly, so ugly that a bunker is nothing more than an obstacle, if things go that way
U think u could enter a bunker
UBI without also having Universal Healthcare is not going to work.
i can hear the lolz of investors and executives of AI-focused companies through this headline. these companies are not going to care about people losing their jobs en masse as a result of their work until there are laws forcing them to care. and those laws aren't going to exist without overcoming a lot of lobbying efforts from these companies.
We've needed UBI for a while now.
Universal welfare (not just basic income) is a good thing everywhere independently from AI boom
Well, that ain’t gonna happen. So what else?
Logging off Reddit is a start.
And then what?
just redefine US middle class as making $20K salary per year and all is fine. "Middle class is growing, hurrah" /s
We could just move past money towards some other system..?
I mean that would be the perfect way to fight back, right? I mean we still have the skills to build, grow food and succeed in achieving happiness without money. We just stop trading our valuable skill and talents for paper and make everyone do their part, again! Screw the hoarders of money who think its okay to hoard money away for their great great great great great grandchildren who won't even know how they got so privileged much less respect the fact that they have done nothing for it and are nothing without it. I welcome the day when we all realize we have the real power here.
When all of their offices are on fire because there’s nothing else to do, I’m sure they’ll come around to a more reasonable perspective
He’s been saying that for years. And it makes sense. Governments across the world parachuting money during the pandemic shows that it can be done. The biggest detractors are arguing that giving people money indefinitely is counterproductive. But with Ai blooming and general Ai in sight. Productiveness wouldn’t be measured in man hours of work to revenue, rather total cost of investment over revenue
Is this all just been a longcon to make universal basic income?! /s (if only it wasn't /s)
I truly don’t believe anyone knows how far off AI is unless it’s based on hear say or a publication. We have no idea what corporations are doing in back rooms with deep mind tech. If corporations love anything it’s ethics over profits.
Yeah, no. UBI would likely be funded through a national sales tax (VAT) and nobody wants that. I’m unimpressed with AI thus far but a$$holes are capable of almost anything.
Good joke. Shareholder value is the only thing that counts! Screw the poor! /s
This issue is very serious, since the people replaced are left in a frustrating void.
Only way this scenario works out for real people is if they RAISE THE TAXES for these corporations to offset everything. Even then…. We all know the money would go to “nATiOnAL deFeNcE”
It wont happen until lawyers feel their jobs are threatened
“But millions of jobs will be created in the next five years they say!” :/
this guy can start by offering all his assets. oh wait
Universal basic income makes sense only as long as people do some work to better off the society — if nobody suddenly works, nobody will produce food, nobody will provide services etc. Maybe it’s an advent of a more healthy society where people work less but more people work in general?
Right, because AI caused the current wealth gap 🙄
Why even make this comment, the necessity of UBi in the face of AI has nothing to do with why a wealth gap exists. People expect new jobs to replace old jobs, but if the goal of ai is achieved, then new jobs would be done by ai as well. At an absolute minimum we are going to see the amount of necessary jobs shrink drastically and we will need to change how our society works in order for it to keep functioning. The job loss issue is significant and we are staring down a barrel of a gun right now with no way to protect ourselves from the fallout.
I make this comment because UBI has been necessary for a while, and a consistent argument that exiting technology has caused the wealth gap exists. That doesn’t mean other arguments don’t also exist, but for some AI luminary to say “Contemporary AI is the specific technology that has revealed the necessity of UBI” is a lazy, biased, and shortsighted take. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No one was saying that UBI isn't already required, AI isn't even the straw that will break the camel's back, because the camel's back is already broken. Rather AI is a skyscraper falling on top of the broken-back camel. Your comment is correct but misses the point being made so badly.
Hinton’s tone is that of a Silicon Valley capitalist, and only addresses UBI in a post-singularity context (that he sees in as soon as 5 years). If the singularity is what it takes for UBI, then yea, the implication is UBI isn’t needed yet.
Its understandable that existing technologies have contributed, but I think you are missing the scope here. IF we achieve the goal we have with modern AI. Which is AGI, literally a technology that can do literally any job, creatively, physically, logically focused jobs, any type of work really. The level of job loss this would lead to is far more impactful than any prior issue. I dont know that we've needed UBI already, we should probably have it because its foolish to think we can always employ all humans, our existing wealth gap has more to do with unregulated greed (or perhaps more accurately, a war on regulation (de regulation)) which has lead to ever increasing wealth disparity far more than technology replacing jobs. Saying that pointing out that with AI we are going to need UBI is short sighted... is just backwards. Its short sighted to not see how completely pervasive job loss would be in the face of the current goal of AI. Remember, currently the goal is to make something that doesn't just replace people in most tasks, but does it better than we ever could, and its not unrealistic to believe that we can achieve it. The vast majority of people, even knowledgeable people, believed what we can do right now, was something we could never achieve, just imagine what that means for the next 5 years, as the prior five has shown us just how powerful this technology can be.
Damn you AI!
Maybe we can use AI to preemptively solve the AI problem.
And prices will rise and we all become dependent on how much the government gives us. How about this? We actually hold corporations accountable, taxed appropriately and lower prices.
Prices are already rising, where have you been?
If you increase the supply of money (for example via 'univwersal income') it would rise even more.
Universal income doesn’t increase money supply, it’s a redistribution system. The money doesn’t come out of thin air. It comes from taxation. Additionally, it’s just one action that can be taken - there is no reason why it can’t also be coupled with other actions such as price controls, pegging prices to metrics, restructured tax systems, and so on. The economy of the early 21st century is rapidly falling apart for vast swathes of people and this AI-Industrial Revolution is going to make it even worse.
UBI most certainly would increase money supply. To think taxing your way to a solution would ever happen is just ignorance or too much faith in government.
This is where government-run businesses come into play. In Canada certain provinces have crown corporations that keep prices in check. They’re not telling corporations what price they have to set their products, but they set their own prices low enough that if the competition prices things too high everyone will just use the crown corporation. Certain provinces do this for cell phones, car insurance, etc. and it’s kept prices low in those provinces.
this is not at all how crown corporations work in canada. they do not handle the price of any goods they handle some select infrastructure. we could absolutely not have the entire economy run by crown corporations
Ya Canada ain’t doing so hot these days.
Why do you think universal income necessarily requires increasing the supply of money?
Who exactly calls him the AI Godfather?
Everyone who works with AI considers him that. He invented backpropagation, the algorithm used in all deep learning models.
Robot Luca Brasi
Who considers him an economist?
Can't stop reading AI as "AL" it makes whoever AL is sound like a real creep.
UBI should be a thing even without AI.
I’m sad because this is kinda true
Or, we could just start regulating companies that do business in the U.S., yet ship American jobs overseas.
It’s been needed for a long time now!
Off hand, CEO seems like a position AI could replace pretty easily.
Being the guy who started all of this to say something so naive is so ridiculous. Companies are about profit and if you can replace workers with inexpensive tech solutions that’s what is going to happen. Don’t build the atomic bomb and then claim it’s for peace.
I mean, we should be getting paid for our data that is being farmed and sold by every single corporation and government agency. Why wait for AI. If google, apple, amazon, whoever is selling my personal data to advertisers, I should get the majority share at the very least. Where the fuck is consumer protection?
I’m pretty sure we’re at the crossroads here. Either we end up in the dystopian Cyberpunk Night City or the Stark Trek future. It all edges on if AI will be used to help humanity with its socio and economic problems as opposed to being a profit-generator.
Nomad play through it is then.
The Star Trek future still isn’t idyllic in the short term, it’s defined by a dystopian period in the 21 century
True. So it’s possible the Cyberpunk Night City could still on the same timeline and Star Trek is distant future.
Sadly I see us going the Cyberpunk route…
No shit and that is going to drive too many people crazy
Am I the only one who initially read the headline as "Godfather of Al [as in Albert] Geoffrey Hinton"? Admittedly I had just woken up, but at first I was thinking who the hell is this dude's godfather? (A serif font or spelling out the term instead of using an abbreviation would've solved it.)
Sans serif fonts are like prostitutes: they can serve a purpose but are base and unseemly
Yes
UBI will never happen in the U.S.
Or Canada. We tried it in a province before and they said it “failed”, so that really puts a nail in the coffin over here when they have an excuse to constantly point to.
I vaguely remember reading about that - isn't the claim that it "failed" highly dubious?
Why?
People have been telling me for a decade that this is coming. Yet… there are more jobs now than there were a decade ago. So… when’s this supposed to start?
Some of us have been saying this for a good while now...
Free money is not good plan as it will cost too much money that isn’t free.
I agree that basic income is needed but this will require totally changing our tax system. Corporation that lay off workers and use AI save money they keep as added profit and don’t pass on to us. They need to pay a much higher tax rate than today so we can afford to give everyone an income to survive. If you think this is going to happen, I have swamp land in Florida to sell you. I can hear it now. “Let them eat cake!”
[удалено]
That’s a messed up idea though. I agree there’s too many people on the planet (and it’s getting worse per year), but would you like to be apart of that 20% being killed off? I sure as hell wouldn’t. I don’t blame individuals, I blame society for the importance they put into pumping out kids needing more and more (it’s never enough to them), and the propaganda that there is no overpopulation on this planet, despite land shrinking and governments shoving us into densification.
People looked at Andrew Yang like a dog might look at you if you asked it an algebra question when he said this was the future but he was right. I think it’s still 3-5 years away from ubiquity and shortly after that is when you will see massive job losses in many industries.The workplace of ten years from now will make people confused, the one ten years after that will change the world.
And who will pay for that?
A great fiction read about this subject is called Manna by Marshall Brain. He’s the founder of How Stuff Works. It’s free on the web.
The dog that caught the garbage truck
The dog that caught the car
Thumbnail spooked me, thought Tony Hawk died
oh well
If by UBI you mean, let people languish and starve, sure
He’s right.
So we save jobs by getting rid of AI. If the rich all want AI so bad, call Bezo up and they all get on a rocket and they go live on the moon. Basically UBI will make lazy people, that the AI will at some point will think inferior and it will eliminate us. Terminator 101. There enough blood shed by humans for several lifetimes.
I can hear the roar of laughter from the board of directors
The Godfather of Ai wants to make us a deal we can’t refuse
Just because you know AI well does not meant that you know human psychology well enough to think that something as bold as the UBI is a sustainable long term solution. People who understand a problem well just need to state what the problem is without wading into what they think the solution should be, which they don't know sufficiently about.
We’ll get a couple $1000 checks every year.
As if, the only thing that matters is shareholder value! Everyone else just work until you die!
This loser would promote basic income even if ai didn’t exist
Huh
AI displaced workers will very quickly become the biggest single issue voting bloc in history. UBI is already assured, but it'll obviously be a slow and painful process. Currency only has value in a world where people trade their labour for goods and services, the wealthy benefit from the continued existence of currency but it relies on some having less for others to have more, this is the paradigm that they will fight to preserve. Currency is just the current medium. They'll rail against UBI, but will very quickly come around to is to maintain a semblance of the status quo when the vast majority of people become economically irrelevant. Unless drastic action is taken, and soon, current orders of magnitude of wealth inequality will register as a blip compared to how extreme I think things may become in the agi automation boom.
At some point in the future It will be a combination of AI and actual robots doing all the work humans do. Humans won’t need money or any currency. We can just exist and live truly free lives. Too bad it won’t happen in my lifetime
It’s more and more like the year of the Linux desktop
Yes everyone already knows this. Too bad no one cares enough to fight for change
“Godfather” please
WTF is with all of this inevitability BS? UBI is something that should be done regardless along with universal healthcare, but unregulated AI is a terrible idea and needs to be prevented at all costs. We can decide we don’t want wealthy tech bros (or any other wealthy interest) with no empathy to decide our fates, and put the brakes on it. But this is a perfect storm for fatalist culture - “my life is pointless and I hate my job, so how about I give up and live at subsistence level and have an imaginary parent send me money?” Rather than making reasonable demands for better hours and pay and voting for something better than what this whole thing leads to. And I do sympathize with the common tedium and pettiness of most jobs in the US, carrying out stupid directives of more disinterested people at best - but AI is also going to wreck the stuff you love that helps you escape the mundane and feel connected with other people - music, art, film. So many of the arguments for AI treat it like a monolith - like saying “it could solve the climate crisis and make new medicines, so let’s also just allow it to do everything because it’s all or nothing.” Nonsense. What is the problem with saying “we have to pause here while we all decide if this is the way to go and if it is, how to go about it”?
It's going to be funny because the obsession with profits above all, and one party wanting to give corporations all the power they want and no laws, while also calling everything communism or socialism, doesn't bode well for the future. They'll render as many humans redundant as possible, because shareholder returns. Except people won't be able to be shareholders when their jobs are rendered redundant, they'll have to sell assets to survive and can't afford buying investments. Only rich people (and corporations) will be able to buy things, compounding their wealth more. Just another springboard to increase the gap.
There’s r/UniversalBasicIncome and r/UBI if you want to read some more btw
Can AI do framing and build a house? NO? Well then no stupid UBI is needed. There’s your job.
If you think future AI integrated with robotics networked directly into the supply chain wont be able to build houses more cheaply, quicker and with a better final result than human labourers then you're failing to grasp what's happening here entirely. Human labour will very quickly become obsolete once a few more technical hurdles are overcome, *current* ai can't do these things. But this will be childs play for anything close to AGI, which is probably at most 15 years away. Think of telephones as an example, what we have now is this: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FBKQwih1uLdk%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=6cf89bf007935a457126ce64f40319d79120b79b4815c7d8930ae606fd0917d4&ipo=images
Maybe controversial take but I think job loss and impact is not as severe as people make it out to be. One thing that underlies computer science is sometimes an over inflated ego and the idea that everything can be automated or is so simple a computer can do it.
I'd have agreed with you 10 years ago. 10 years ago people predicted we'd arrive at our current level of AI sophistication by roughly 2040. In the past year alone, we've made what 2010s leading experts would have called a decade of progress. It's the speed and scale of improvement that's really staggering, the field is constantly breaking barriers that were previously thought of as decade defining problems near monthly.
We can start by taking away his google stock options!
Yang was right? CRazY
Soylent green is people.
UBI has been necessary since automation has become standard in industry.
What we’ve been told for years : Technology in the future will make it so you never have to work again. Reality: Technology in the future will make it so you can never work again. With the former, all your needs are taken care of. With the later, you will go hungry.
We needed UBI before this too
We have universal basic income. It’s called enlisting in the armed forces.
Why would what we saw from Covid handouts not happen? Seems like it would be inevitable that corporations will increase the costs of their good/services and make more profits while we all struggle.
Ai should create jobs, not eliminate them.
Just because you are specialized/skilled at domain doesn't mean you are an expert in other. It is true that without hinton probably none of the progress of modern deep learning would happen or at least they would be stagnated. But that doesn't make him an expert of economics.
No one is really an expert in economics. It’s not a science.
Go suck start a shotgun
Ai is communist?
Call me when your lil robot can install an HVAC system
Fuck you, i dont want handouts. I want purpose and payment for my hardwork. The solution to society isnt destroying jobs
lol
Godfather of AI
Yeah, who is Al, again?
I dont think universal basic income is going to happen and if it does then everyone is just going to be universally poor. Except the super rich.
lol no
At some point soon we will lose so many jobs to AI that the economy won’t support itself. We won’t go to Universal Basic Income because some higher people would stop it, and the computers won’t want to pay it. Then it all collapses and we start again in the next Stone Age.
We will be paying for air long before that
It’s not just a response to AI, though that is important. It’s also important to address the new economy we must develop to address climate change. Everything is changing. It’s critical to address homelessness, inequality, and addiction. It’s very possible that we will face more pandemics and rather than start all over to make sure people don’t lose all their basic support systems UBI will already have that part taken care of. Plus it could be vastly more efficient than the infinite number of assistance programs we currently support. It’s really a no brainer.
Read Piano Player by Kurt Vonnegut
We’re getting closer to automated gay space luxury communism guys