Question for you guys.
A lot of money is going into AI to basically make robots to replace the jobs of a huge number of poor people. That is going to cause mass unemployment and all sorts of shit whenever they get it working.
Is there a way to keep this from being horrible without going all "seize the means of production"?
1. Robots and AI are 2 different techs
2. Robots have been around for 40+ years.
3. AI might be more dangerous than nuclear war
4. Society will go on and will likely thrive
5. Don't worry about it. There will be plenty of jobs.
>Ex Machina was just a movie
Real AI and automatons worth a damn are 500+ years out, if ever. Which is precisely why pic related is happening.
Robots != AI
You are thinking about automation. What this means is jobs will change and you need to learn new things. Instead of doing the work slowly, you control a routine/automation that works faster than you. There will always be work because automation will always have exceptions that need to be handled.
Tl;Dr you need to learn the skills to be the Robot Masters, or vote for basic income.
Yeah, we use it to socialize society so we live off the wealth produced by cheap robot labour and common poor folk don't need to really worry about jobs because food and shelter are provided as basic human rights.
There would still be incentives to stive to innovate or work more interesting careers like arts music and litterature, but imagine a world where even the poorest of the poor wouldn't need to steal to live a comfortable life and could flourish in their own time.
I for one think it'll be pretty wonderful.
>skills to be the Robot Masters
This is false.
The danger is when the singularity happens and humans are no longer needed.
Humans wouldn't even see it coming.
We just don't know if the AI will tolerate humans. It's very possible they would simply exterminate us because we will be as annoying as mosquitoes are to us.
Some would argue that toil will become obsolete and humans would be free to pursue arts and leisure. But that would be entirely up to the AI overlords to decide.
>to replace the jobs of a huge number of poor people
Automation/computers haven't just replaced unskilled labor.
Millions of white collar jobs involving math and data work are already gone and much more is to come.
Dumb robots do little, "Smart" robots can do far more. With enough Lifting bots, self driving trucks and drones you could easily render millions of jobs unnecessary. Not "good" jobs but enough to cause a dreadful amount of strife.
>Is there a way to keep this from being horrible without going all "seize the means of production"?
Universal basic income and some form of free training to become useful at something machines can't do yet. You need to give the poors something else to do besides starve and revolt.
Well before that even, the truth is there isn't a need for that many "robot masters" and your competition for those handful of robot master jobs is everyone in the world with that sort of education and training.
This stuff doesn't need that much maintenance and companies use small teams they fly around to handle shit.
The high tech industry is mostly giant buildings full of servers running 24/7 with a handful of people wandering around in case something screws up and to assist when the team of set-up guys flies in to install new stuff.