Let’s assume that something like universal basic income covers the essential survival needs of food, clothing and shelter. Then in a world in which there is nearly no remunerated work for humans to do, my guess is that people will take up various forms of hobby work which they don’t depend on for survival but which will form a sort of crafts trade. We already see things like gardening, carpentry, etc. that people do just for enjoyment. Some people knap flint or blacksmith swords just to keep the art alive.
Honestly that was totally inadvertent and totally unnoticed. But I’ll take credit nevertheless. 
Yeah, I think this will happen. In a fully-automated world, you’d be able to get almost any product you’d need or want, but they will almost all be generic, robot-produced identical copies. If you want something unique, as a conversation piece, you’ll still go for a human-made artisanal piece, produced by someone who does that as a hobby, or as an historical re-enactor, or keeping a family tradition alive. They won’t be cheap, particularly compared to the mass-produced stuff, but such unique items will be highly prized, I think.
Well, maybe. But that path is in its infancy, and we don’t know how far we can take it. The same with AI - it currently takes a huge amount of energy to do a calculation our brains can do on a few watts. But we aren’t even close to figuring out how to do that. Digital circuitry has limits due to voltage drops across junctions and such, so we may need a whole new paradigm. We’re not there yet. Not even close. Not even on the road.
People watch hentai and porn cartoons for sexual release. Some use inflatable dolls that aren’t even close to being realistic. If they get a doll that talks, has facial expressions, and all the necessary parts, I think that would be good enough for many.
Hell, people get so attached to their toy robots they give them funerals rather than throw them out when they break. I think they’ll be okay with robot sex. Maybe too okay with it. Things could get weird.
Robotics won’t make materials abundant. All they remove is some of the labor cost. That doesn’t end scarcity. In fact, nothing ends scarcity, because what people want is relative to what they and the people around them already have.
You could show someone from 1800 the living conditions of a low wage worker today, and they’d wonder why you wanted anything else, because they’d see riches beyond their imagination.
In 1950 people aspired to middle class lifestyles that are considered poor today. A 1,000 square foot salt box bungalow for a family of five would be considered poor living conditions today, but it was the middle class standard not long ago.
There is no amount of wealth we will achieve realistically that’s high enough that scarcity will no longer exist, or that people won’t want more. It’s how we are wired.
Well, that very much depends on which modern low wage worker and which 1800-era person you’re talking about, of course.
There were a whole lot of people in 1800 sufficiently wealthy to consider the lifestyle of even a relatively thriving low wage worker of today to be appallingly cramped, dirty and deprived. And of course, there are still a whole lot of non-thriving low wage workers today whose lifestyles really are appallingly cramped, dirty and deprived, even by non-wealthy 1800-era standards.
Sure, all the time travelers would be hugely impressed by smartphones and refrigerators and such, but most people circa 1800 would still be smart enough to notice that shiny magic devices can coexist with filthy vermin-infested falling-down buildings, for example.
The idea of human material abundance as a story of nothing but monotonic progress is a fairly stunted and one-dimensional way of looking at historical change.
According to the BBC, AI is great and may create jobs, and we should all embrace it. I don’t know enough about the technology to shun or hug it immediately, but I also know enough that few advancements are purely good or evil. A quote from the article that seems a little ominous: "Workers resistant to AI could be seen as unwilling or incapable of adapting, says Frey. “I think workers that don’t work with AI are going to find their skills [become] obsolete quite rapidly. So, therefore, it’s imperative to work with AI to stay employed, stay productive, and have up-to-date skills.”
"Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted:
Karl Sharro - Twitter
I fail to comprehend how the current LLM fad can impact corporate functioning. Using GBT as you would spell-checker to clean up your verbiage makes sense, but that’s not AI. It does not add anything of substance. Chatbots adding substance would create real issues. Corporate managers would be hard pressed to implement strategies created by chatbots rather than themselves.
Chatbot AI will probably impact call centers and a few other specialty areas, but not the general labor market. I do not believe we are on our way to field work - yet.
No, there really weren’t, not for most definitions of “whole lot.” People who lived like the characters in “Sense and Sensibility” were a tiny, tiny fraction of people. And even they didn’t, in many ways, live as well as working class people today.
Of course there were some people in 1800 living better than some people today, no one said otherwise, but the indisputable fact is that people generally live in a way today that in 1800 would have seemed like fantasy to the equivalent socio-economic level, and to several rungs higher on that ladder. I am incredulous that anyone would argue otherwise. Do you know how POOR people used to be?
Feel free to put whatever preferred qualifiers you choose on phrases like “a low wage worker” and “a person from 1800” to make what you consider to be interesting statements about them. I was just pointing out that the validity of such statements is heavily dependent on such qualifiers.
Perhaps a slight hijack, but how will AI affect the classroom? I don’t think AI will replace teachers, but I agree with this article that it certainly will transform it and we have to be ready.
Looks like lawyers are safe from the AI menace for a while:
(gift link)
The article should be titled, “here’s what happens when you decide to use a technology you don’t understand, then don’t even bother to check the results.”
This lawyer was just ignorant and stupid and lazy. The fault was not ChatGPT’s.
AI should be revolutionary in the classroom. Every child can have the equivalent of their own teaching assistant.
That is, if the teacher’s unions don’t pull strings and get it banned to protect their jobs.
The point is that lawyers can’t depend on it to do their research. It could and likely will generate all kinds of bogus citations and “facts”. So their jobs are safe for that. The same thing for other fields, such as science or medicine.
Do you want it to be teaching your kid a bunch of bogus facts?
If they’re not just ignorant and stupid and lazy they’ll check the results.
'Course why we don’t just skip to the fact checking is a curious question.
This is not a limitation of LLMs, it was just a limitation - a well known one - of ChatGPT and other LLMs with no live internet connection and no truth-checking functionality.
Bing does not do this if you use it in precise mode. It will also cite its facts properly, with links to cites. Bard will do this as well. In the future, you can bet that LLMs will have robust accuracy checking - probably better than people.
Also, to use an LLM for legal work it would be much better to first fine-tune it on case law. There will be dedicated legal LLMs soon that will be much better.
Poisoned question. There’s no evidence future LLMs aimed at education will teach your kids a bunch of bogus facts. What they will do is be there for the kids who don’t understand part of a lesson, or to drill them in the subject, or provide enriching material, or tailor questions to the kid’s individual ability level. An LLM could give a child a quiz on material, figure out where the kid is going wrong, and tailor a lesson plan to help the kid understand.
This is going to be a massive help to home schoolers for sure, and will probably accelerate the shift to alternative education. But this could also revitalize the public education system, if the teacher’s unions will allow it. They probably won’t.
There’ll be no push for future LLMs aimed at education to teach your kids a bunch of bogus facts? I’m already seeing Creationists trying to teach ChatGPT that all of science is wrong.
I have no idea what you are on about. These seem like ridiculous takes on a complex subject.
What is the difference between The Idea People and Monkey Paw Wishes? I see a bright future there. Not sure for whom.
Pretty stupid lawyer for not checking the legitimacy of the AI-generated cases. I wouldn’t use AI that haphazardly if I were an attorney, nor would I when I practiced medicine.
But, I do use AI now in my post-retirement career as a graphic artist and social media content creator. I mostly enjoy creating infographics and animations in this position, so I don’t need AI for that. But, creating fresh, exciting text content on a regular basis for my clients is a chore, so I started using ChatGPT to assist me in that. It does a great job. Not only does it create eye-grabbing, industry-specific content, but it also includes appropriate hashtags and emojis for my social media posts (using its new template/prompt feature). It frees up my time to spend more time on clients’ graphics and videos.
But now, in the latest Photoshop Beta upgrade, they included AI (generative fill) and it’s going to be a graphic game-changer. I’ve used Photoshop since it started (1990), and this AI update is the most significant upgrade yet—it’s truly amazing (a few bugs, but I’m confident those will be eliminated in future versions). How can I not use it? It won’t replace me yet, but I’m starting to get a little nervous.
When they include similar AI into Premiere, After Effects, and Cinema 4D (and they surely will), then it may be time for me to retire for good…or, maybe become the AI’s assistant.
We are on the threshold of a societal paradigm shift, the likes we haven’t seen since Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type. Exciting times…but a little scary.