From where I'm standing, the very low wage underclass arrived many years ago.
AI and robotics just make it worse.
But it is very arrogant to think that it will be limited to certain types of jobs.
Things have never been meritocratic. We have always had extreme inequality. Technology has made things slightly more fair but that is still very unevenly distributed.
We _should_ be able to leverage advanced technology to lift everyone up.
I am going to point out something uncomfortable: I think that racism, classism, and elitism is extremely prevalent globally and may be one of the biggest impediments to the even distribution of technology benefits.
We do need to redesign society. That starts with having a realistic educated respect for human beings in general otherwise it's going to be a bad design. It also necessitates refined and contemporary worldviews that properly integrate technology rather than outdated vague ideologies.
Counterpoint: "Low wage underclass" has described most of humans for all of existence. It is only in very recent history that we have had a large middle class. And while the middle class is slipping, I don't think the message is that we need to "redesign society".
Society has been working well recently (on the grand scale) - we just need to tweak some of the settings so that we don't backslide into aristocracy and feudalism.
"All of existence" is pretty wildly wrong. "All of civilization" might be a bit more on track. I wouldn't describe hunter-gatherer societies as particularly hierarchical. There may have been individuals in charge, but the concept of a leisure nobility class didn't seem to form until we developed agriculture.
I was specifically talking about quality of life, I wasn't even thinking of hierarchy.
Although, that difference speaks a lot about how one might see this argument. I suppose some people may be willing to have a worse life if the tradeoff was a more egalitarian world.
I am unclear how you got that out of my statement at all. I am arguing that we have made huge leaps of progress that we should not be willing to give up.
A good illustration of this is in Hans Rosling's books. We're making unprecedented bounds on metrics that matter - like childhood poverty, disease, illiteracy, hunger, child labor, violent crime, lead usage, etc.
Some of these things we are at risk of backsliding on, but for even the poorest person in America the quality of life is so much better today than it was even 50 years ago.
But that isn't nearly good enough, and it's much worse for people in many other countries.
And that is largely despite many structural aspects of our society. There have been some improvements to social structures, but almost all quality of life improvements have been from technology gains.
The social structures are fundamentally based on elitism and exploitation. The prevailing counterviews seem to be basically 1950s style centralized planning.
I'm not saying we should throw the baby out, but we need a more fair, refined, and technologically sound foundational worldview.
I don't think we should abandon money or centralize things. But we do need, for example, protocols and/or protocol registries enforced by government for sharing information effectively, such as about energy and resources. We also need the monetary systems to be integrated into truly democratic government in such a way that resources and power are distributed in a sane way.
Extrapolating from what we have to where AI/Automation is going, it seems like UBI would need to be embraced. The only way that could ever happen would be for all stakeholders to collaborate and map out a transition plan.
Considering the current political climate, that is not likely to happen. There are many things about China that I do admire, but their ability to map out and move their country forward as a whole is one thing we'd be well-served to learn from.
It's fascinating to me how dramatically software engineering has changed over the last couple of years due to advanced LLMs and programming tools.
For whatever high percentage of engineers, having AI generate and edit code is now a large part of their day. That and reviewing code and testing take up more time.
Whether you want to call them engineers or not, producing custom software is much more accessible now.
There are a lot of consequences. For one thing, I think that this is going to reduce the market share of products like Salesforce and some other relatively high priced software that is often highly customized. There will be lots more open source competitors and many companies or departments generating custom software to replace it or parts of it.
Can radicle seeds run over IPV6? Seems like since IPV6 doesn't have NAT it should be a big advantage for p2p and as it becomes more available the need for everyone to set up port forwarding or get a VPS to seed should go down.
ISPs will try to block use of IPV6 for serving content, but eventually I think users will win because ultimately it should be a right to share information.
I think the idea is great, but look at services like Gmail. Sure everyone can setup their own email service, and client. But most people just go on gmails web UI. We've had XMPP and other similar IM services for centuries, but Discord and Slack are more popular. People like simplicity.
People use Discord and Slack because they have to, not because they want to. Having to keep 10 chat apps to somewhat keep in touch with people is a sign that something is very, very wrong.
People use gmail because it was free and in the right place at the right time with the right features. The web UI sucked when it came out, now it sucks even worse, but all email UI sucks.
None of these things are simple or good or the best solution, they're just free and people need to keep in touch somehow.
> People use Discord and Slack because they have to
I disagree that anyone HAS TO use Discord. Slack on the other hand, yeah I can see how that would be the case. However, the industry would have not adopted Slack if it wasn't good as it was, the landscape was ripe for something new. Sadly Slack barely updates with anything meaningful.
Being allowed to serve data from your own device should be seen as a natural human right.
If the networks don't have capacity or something then we need networks that can support that.
The idea that all of that has to go in the Fediverse on a server or something is just gatekeeping.
Wait a few years as IPV6 becomes truly ubiquitous. This will become very obvious to everyone and standard. People must be allowed to communicate directly, even if they have a lot of clients.
The opinions are slightly similar to remote work. Telecommuting was an obvious next step for a long time, it just took a certain number of decades for society to realize it.
I think that programming as a job has already changed. Because it is hard for most people to tell the difference between someone who actually has programming skills and experience versus someone who has some technical ingenuity but has only ever used AI to program for them.
Now the expectation from some executives or high level managers is that managers and employees will create custom software for their own departments with minimal software development costs. They can do this using AI tools, often with minimal or no help from software engineers.
Its not quite the equivalent of having software developed entirely by software engineers, but it can be a significant step up from what you typically get from Excel.
I have a pretty radical view that the leading edge of this stuff has been moving much faster than most people realize:
2024: AI-enhanced workflows automating specific tasks
2026: the AI Employee emerges -- robust memory, voice interface, multiple tasks, computer and browser use. They manage their own instructions, tools and context
2027: Autonomous AI Companies become viable. AI CEO creates and manages objectives and AI employees
Note that we have had the AI Employee and AI Organization for awhile in different somewhat weak forms. But in the next 18 months or so as the model and tooling abilities continue to improve, they will probably be viable for a growing number of business roles and businesses.
AI and robotics just make it worse.
But it is very arrogant to think that it will be limited to certain types of jobs.
Things have never been meritocratic. We have always had extreme inequality. Technology has made things slightly more fair but that is still very unevenly distributed.
We _should_ be able to leverage advanced technology to lift everyone up.
I am going to point out something uncomfortable: I think that racism, classism, and elitism is extremely prevalent globally and may be one of the biggest impediments to the even distribution of technology benefits.
We do need to redesign society. That starts with having a realistic educated respect for human beings in general otherwise it's going to be a bad design. It also necessitates refined and contemporary worldviews that properly integrate technology rather than outdated vague ideologies.
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