No worries, Dave, no need to stripe it out if you don't want.
Look, I think you're making too much and too little of it at the same time. Most of the claims being made out the future of AI right now are likely to prove as overblown as most of the claims made at the top of any other tech boom (remember the hype about VR back in the early 90s? Space travel during the early Space Age? Walking robots built by DARPA for Vietnam?). There is a lot of hype going around right now, and no new breakthroughs have been made recently to justify them, simply improvements on old processes. Eventually this boom will shake itself out, a lot of companies will go out of business, separating out the wheat from the chaff, and the process will start over. There's definitely a trend towards automation that is going to continue, but you can't just look at it in isolation. The rest of the world is modernizing, and yet the present resource base and waste sinks can't even handle a European level of consumption on a global scale, much less an American one. There are arbitrary limits to energy efficiency, and even energy use, for reasons of waste heat if nothing else. Speaking of heating, what about global warming? You have been banging on about that for a while, and that is going to place a great deal of strain on the industrial system worldwide. There is already a great deal of pushback on the use of our present primary sources of energy (fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro, etc.), and places like Hawaii and Germany are already experiencing a great deal of problems integrating sources like PV and wind on a large scale in the absence of effective grid-scale storage. So mechanization and automation are going to have these other factors affecting their cost structure.
But let's say it continues. So what? Deep Blue beat a chess grandmaster back in the late 90s, and yet people still play and compete in chess. James Boggs was talking about the imminent end of work back in the 60s, and how well placed the African American community was to handle it. There's a reason why people still watch boxing or the UFC rather than a giant version of rock 'em sock 'em robots, even though I am pretty sure we've been able to build one that could beat the shit out of Mike Tyson ('80s) for decades now. We industrialized food production decades ago, and people are clamoring for alternatives, and willing to pay through the nose for them (there's a reason why Whole Foods is also known as Whole Paycheck). And the transition to an economy based more on personal services and entertainment has been going on in the developed world for decades now. When I was living in New York, I met or saw tons of people with goofy jobs like dog walker/groomer, fantasy football analyst, image consultant, personal assistant, etc. The popularity for Downton Abbey increased the demand for high level personal services (do you know how much a butler can make?) Jesus, there are people who make a living playing video games and selling their characters/equipment to people too lazy to do the work for them, and the companies running those environments can be pretty heavy-handed about cracking down on bot usage. Since, as you pointed out before, this is not something that's going to happen overnight, but an ongoing process, we'll probably continue to see an increase in these sorts of things over time. People need to find things to do in order to be happy (have you ever had a truly extended period of free time with little to no responsibilities? It's depressing). They'll still want to compete for status, still search for novelty, still have limits on the amount of time and interest they can muster, even if we wave away constraints on energy, raw materials, land, processing power, etc. that will likely exist long into the future. As I alluded to in the other thread, we have examples (segments of the Roman Empire, the 19th century European Aristocracy, the American gentry during the same timeframe, etc.) of whole societies of people who didn't work as a matter of principle, who still founds things to do to occupy their time and make each other happy/miserable, based on, yes, entertainment and emotional satisfaction.
Are there going to be issues? Of course there are, but fixating solely on the issue of automation and the apparent concomitant need for a basic income to go along with it misses the point entirely. How do we reconcile our productive technical capacity with our consumption? How is our productive capacity (and the inputs it requires) distributed? If there is a basic income (like, say, a universal Social Security regardless of age), how much does it give out? How is that figure adjusted, and who (what?) adjusts it? Where does that money go as it is presumably spent on things? Is it taxed back out of circulation? Who is taxing it? Who is being taxed? If we aren't using something recognizable as money, how are allocation and distribution being handled instead? What is being produced, and how is that decided? How are all of these decisions being made and remade according to conditions? We don't know, and since the conditions in question are at this point largely hypothetical and will be for some time, we can't know, and so all of this handwringing about the RISE OF THE MACHINES is, at this point, ahistorical and entirely beside the point.
Look, I think you're making too much and too little of it at the same time. Most of the claims being made out the future of AI right now are likely to prove as overblown as most of the claims made at the top of any other tech boom (remember the hype about VR back in the early 90s? Space travel during the early Space Age? Walking robots built by DARPA for Vietnam?). There is a lot of hype going around right now, and no new breakthroughs have been made recently to justify them, simply improvements on old processes. Eventually this boom will shake itself out, a lot of companies will go out of business, separating out the wheat from the chaff, and the process will start over. There's definitely a trend towards automation that is going to continue, but you can't just look at it in isolation. The rest of the world is modernizing, and yet the present resource base and waste sinks can't even handle a European level of consumption on a global scale, much less an American one. There are arbitrary limits to energy efficiency, and even energy use, for reasons of waste heat if nothing else. Speaking of heating, what about global warming? You have been banging on about that for a while, and that is going to place a great deal of strain on the industrial system worldwide. There is already a great deal of pushback on the use of our present primary sources of energy (fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro, etc.), and places like Hawaii and Germany are already experiencing a great deal of problems integrating sources like PV and wind on a large scale in the absence of effective grid-scale storage. So mechanization and automation are going to have these other factors affecting their cost structure.
But let's say it continues. So what? Deep Blue beat a chess grandmaster back in the late 90s, and yet people still play and compete in chess. James Boggs was talking about the imminent end of work back in the 60s, and how well placed the African American community was to handle it. There's a reason why people still watch boxing or the UFC rather than a giant version of rock 'em sock 'em robots, even though I am pretty sure we've been able to build one that could beat the shit out of Mike Tyson ('80s) for decades now. We industrialized food production decades ago, and people are clamoring for alternatives, and willing to pay through the nose for them (there's a reason why Whole Foods is also known as Whole Paycheck). And the transition to an economy based more on personal services and entertainment has been going on in the developed world for decades now. When I was living in New York, I met or saw tons of people with goofy jobs like dog walker/groomer, fantasy football analyst, image consultant, personal assistant, etc. The popularity for Downton Abbey increased the demand for high level personal services (do you know how much a butler can make?) Jesus, there are people who make a living playing video games and selling their characters/equipment to people too lazy to do the work for them, and the companies running those environments can be pretty heavy-handed about cracking down on bot usage. Since, as you pointed out before, this is not something that's going to happen overnight, but an ongoing process, we'll probably continue to see an increase in these sorts of things over time. People need to find things to do in order to be happy (have you ever had a truly extended period of free time with little to no responsibilities? It's depressing). They'll still want to compete for status, still search for novelty, still have limits on the amount of time and interest they can muster, even if we wave away constraints on energy, raw materials, land, processing power, etc. that will likely exist long into the future. As I alluded to in the other thread, we have examples (segments of the Roman Empire, the 19th century European Aristocracy, the American gentry during the same timeframe, etc.) of whole societies of people who didn't work as a matter of principle, who still founds things to do to occupy their time and make each other happy/miserable, based on, yes, entertainment and emotional satisfaction.
Are there going to be issues? Of course there are, but fixating solely on the issue of automation and the apparent concomitant need for a basic income to go along with it misses the point entirely. How do we reconcile our productive technical capacity with our consumption? How is our productive capacity (and the inputs it requires) distributed? If there is a basic income (like, say, a universal Social Security regardless of age), how much does it give out? How is that figure adjusted, and who (what?) adjusts it? Where does that money go as it is presumably spent on things? Is it taxed back out of circulation? Who is taxing it? Who is being taxed? If we aren't using something recognizable as money, how are allocation and distribution being handled instead? What is being produced, and how is that decided? How are all of these decisions being made and remade according to conditions? We don't know, and since the conditions in question are at this point largely hypothetical and will be for some time, we can't know, and so all of this handwringing about the RISE OF THE MACHINES is, at this point, ahistorical and entirely beside the point.