I have very little objection to AI, providing we get UBI to mitigate the fallout.
I was thinking about this and realized that if we want an AI boom to lead to UBI, AI needs to start replacing the cushy white collar jobs first.
If you start by replacing menial labor, there will be more unemployment but you’re not going to build the political will to do anything because those jobs were seen as “less than” and the political class will talk about how good and efficient it is that these jobs are gone.
You need to start by automating away “good jobs” that directly affect middle/upper class people. Jobs where people have extensive training and/or a “calling” to the field. Once lawyers, software engineers, doctors, executives, etc get smacked with widespread unemployment, the political class will take UBI much more seriously.
I suspect elites will build a two-tiered AI system where only a select few get access to the cutting-edge stuff, while the rest of us get stuck with the leftovers.
They'll use their clout—money, lobbying, and media influence—to lock in their advantage and keep decision-making within their circle.
In the end, this setup would just widen the gap, cementing power imbalances as AI continues to reshape everything. UBI will become the bare minimum to keep the masses sedated.
needing a lawyer and needing a doctor are very common cases of bankruptcy in the US. both feel very primed to be replaced by models
Incidentally it seems to be happening in that order, but laborers won't have a long respite (if you can call it that)
i think that the factor determining which jobs get usurped by AI first isn't going to be based on the cognitive difficulty as much as it is about robotic difficulty and interaction with the physical world.
if you job consists of reading from a computer -> thinking -> entering things back into a computer, you're on the top of the list because you don't need to set up a bunch of new sensors and actuators. In other words… the easier it is to do your job remotely, the more likely it is you’ll get automated away
But why will that happen? If they have robots and AI and all the money, what’s stopping the powers that be from disposing of the excess biomass?
What's there to gain? What do they care about biomass? They're still in the business of selling products, until the economy explodes. I find this to be circular because you could say the same thing about right now, "why don't they dispose of the welfare class" etc.
There's also the fact that "they" aren't all one and the same persons with the exact same worldview and interests.
You speak like they would have to do something 'aggressive'. If you can achieve a circular economy, where robots produce products for the benefit of a lucky few who can live off of their investments (in the robots), then the rest of the population will 'naturally' go away.
You might say "but why not use just 1% of that GDP on making sure the rest of humanity lives in at least minimal comfort"? But clearly -- we already choose not to do that today. 1% of the GDP of the developed world would be more than enough to solve many horrifying problems in the developing world -- what we actually give is a far smaller fraction, and ultimately not enough.
The Davos class was highly concerned about ecology before Davos was even a thing. In America, their minions (the “coastie” class) are coming to see the liquidation of the kulaks as perhaps not such a bad thing. If it devolves into a “let them eat cake” scenario, one has to wonder how things will play out in “proles vs robot pinkertons”. Watch what the sonic crowd control trucks did in Serbia last week.
Of course there is always the issue of “demand”—of keeping the factories humming, but when you are worth billions, your immediate subordinates are worth hundreds of millions, and all of their subordinates are worth a few million, maybe you come to a point where “lebensraum” becomes more valuable to you than another zero at the end of your balance?
When AI replaces the nerds (in progress), they become excess biomass. Not talking about a retarded hollywood-style apocalypse. Economic uncertainty is more than enough to suppress breeding in many populations. “not with a bang, but a whimper”
If you know any of “them”, you will know that “they” went to the same elite prep schools, live in the same cities, intermarry, etc. The “equality” nonsense is just a lie to numb the proles. In 2025 we have a full-blown hereditary nobility.
edit: answer to ianfeust6:
The West is not The World. There are over a billion Chinese, Indians, Africans…
Words mean things. Who said tree hugger? If you are an apex predator living in an increasingly cloudy tank, there is an obvious solution to the cloudyness.
So your take is that the wealthiest class will purge people because they're tree-huggers. Not the worst galaxy-brained thing I've heard before, but still laughable.
Don't forget fertility rate is basically stagnant in the West and falling globally, so this seems like a waste of time considering most people just won't breed at all.
repeated for thread continuity:
The West is not The World. There are over a billion Chinese, Indians, Africans…
Words mean things. Who said tree hugger? If you are an apex predator living in an increasingly cloudy tank, there is an obvious solution to the cloudyness.
also: emissions will continue to drop
there has been far more degradation to the natural environment than mere air pollution. general sherman decimated the plains indians with a memorandum. do you think that you are sufficiently better and sufficiently more indispensable than a plains indian?
Right, well even without AGI (no two people agree on whether it's coming within 5 years, 30, or 100), finely-tuned LLMs can disrupt the economy fast if the bottlenecks get taken care of. The big one is the robot-economy. This is popularly placed further off in timescales, but it does not require AGI at all. We already have humanoid robots on the market for the price of a small car, they're just dumb. Once we scale up solar and battery production, and then manufacturing, it's coming for menial labor jobs. They already have all the pieces, it's a foregone conclusion. What we don't know how to do is to create a real "intelligence", and here the evangelists will wax about the algorithms and the nature of intelligence, but at the end of the day it takes more than scaling up an LLM to constitute an AGI. The bet is that AI-assisted research will lead to breakthrough in a trivial amount of time.
With white-collar jobs the threat of AI feels more abstract and localized, and you still get talk about "creating new jobs", but when robots start coming off the assembly line people will demand UBI so fast it will make your head spin. Either that or they'll try to set fire to them or block them with unions, etc. Hard to say when because another effort like the CHIPS act could expedite things.
Humanoid robots on the market for the price of a small car? That's complete science fiction. There have been demos of such robots but only demos.
> Humanoid robots on the market for the price of a small car? That's complete science fiction.
Goldman Sachs doesn't think so.
https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/humanoid-robots-mark...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/humanoid-robot-market-researc...
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/robotics...
They don't even need to be humanoid is the thing.
16k humanoid robots https://www.unitree.com/g1/
And 1X has apparently been testing theirs in home environments for months, though it looks like they're not for sale yet: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/21/norways-1x-is-building-a-h...
https://www.unitree.com/g1/ 16k humanoid robot
Do they do anything or are they an expensive toy in the shape of a humanoid robot?