I think the difficulty for many people is not imagining a path to post-scarcity, per se, but instead that they have been given no commitments by their government or business leaders that they will get to benefit from it, after it is achieved.
It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector.
To which those employees respond: What will happen to us?
And they are told: things will be great, you won’t need to work in the factories any longer, and we will have no shortage of goods.
Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”
Well, historically, it's sort of worked out on its own. Automation displaces workers but also creates new jobs in other sectors. We have maintained full employment at higher wages.
That said, some displaced workers have experienced substantial difficulty moving to other industries, especially if those new jobs are in different cities or countries. And it is also possible that this time is different, although I'm not convinced.
That can work as long as consumption can increase infinitely to meet increased production. Unless consumption continues to increase, we will find ourselves unable to produce those new jobs in other industries.
But said history was not peaceful. Business leaders repeatedly attempted to use these transformations in tons of ways to screw over workers - for example, the only reason we no longer have lots of small children being mangled or killed at their factory jobs is because of workers who protested against unsafe working conditions and child labor. I see no reason to expect anything better from our corporate overlords of today, who are generally gleefully supporting fascist movements, or getting involved in illegally decimating government programs.
Given how much control capitalists have over almost every mechanism for organizing, I don't even know if such labor movements would still be possible today.
> Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”
This process will take generations. Over time, people will work less and less as productivity steadily increases (we already see this in the pre-AI era as technology has accumulated). Eventually, AI will do all necessary labor and goods/services will be incredibly cheap. Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.
Also, it's possible that this technology just doesn't pan out. There could be a bottleneck or a nuclear war or whatever. Maybe it just stops scaling, or it stays in the realm of text-generation and can't replace manual labor. But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
> This process will take generations... Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.
I think the crux is in how fast you think the technology is developing. The widespread view in Silicon Valley is that drop-in remote workers will be a reality within a couple years. Sam Altman is already claiming that AGI has been achieved [1]. Jack Clark from Anthropic puts a >50% chance on recursive self-improvement by the end of 2028 [2]. This is an enormous sector of labor being made redundant in a very short amount of time.
So the actions taken in this specific administration over these next few years become pivotal. The industry is unregulated and currently undergoing explosive growth in a way we haven't seen since the railroads, in entirely the wrong direction to Sanders' interests. He is a major player in the political process, so of course he will take measures to get things under control.
> But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
That's why the bill is about "temporarily pausing" development, not banning it forever.
This is to say nothing of the catastophic risks that the bill is actually mostly about, not just the labor disruptions.
This is a fantastic application of an LLM. What’s great is that the LLMisms fold neatly into “dumb but lovable sidekick”.
So even when it chokes or stumbles on a command, the kind of frustration the user expresses when correcting it feels natural and part of the game even.
And what are we supposed to do with the two of you apparantly living under a rock [0], and going through baby's first "kids these days" moments, exactly?
Never heard of LMGTFY ("Let Me Google That For You")? Why do you think it exists?
Or "Google / Wikipedia is your friend"?
Or RTFM ("Read The Fucking Manual")?
Really not new inventions (and "zoomers" were there for them, cause the oldest ones are pushing 30! [1]). Not hard to search for either, by the way...
[0] or rather, going through some very conveniently selective amnesia
[1] just to really give you a sense of how stupid this generation-xyz thing is, this "generation" includes people whose first OS was entirely possibly Windows 98, and at the same time, people whose first OS was Windows 10
Texas is not a monolith. The people who are decrying this action are local conservation groups and activists. These are not necessarily the same people who voted to put the current administration in power.
To simply write this off as “they deserve it” would be a mistake, and is unproductive.
But they are the same group. Part of a democracy is that when the group decides, the group accepts the decision. Of course there can always be dissent, and no group is a monolith. But the fact is Texans voted for this. If Texans didn't want this they wouldn't have it.
My dog often gets misidentified as a restricted breed. This used to make apartment hunting difficult because, occasionally, the property manager would visually ID the dog breed as banned, I’d have to go to the vet and get paperwork, potentially gene testing, arguing she wasn't, it was a whole thing.
But, recently, the apartment I moved into had an online portal where I had to upload a photo and it would identify the breed to determine if it was approved.
I correctly assumed the portal was using an LLM for this purpose. I wrote a script which submitted different photos of my dog to the major LLM providers until it found a photo which all the LLMs would identify as the correct breed.
I simply submitted that photo and, as expected, passed with flying colors.
Interest has risen in tandem with the popularity of LLMs. I have worked on these sorts of things as part of internal tooling.
Sometimes these strategies are used to provide LLMs with a greater understanding of your codebase to improve code generation results.
Additionally, techniques which allow humans to visualize the shape of code are being explored as engineers become less familiar with the specific implementation.
It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector.
To which those employees respond: What will happen to us?
And they are told: things will be great, you won’t need to work in the factories any longer, and we will have no shortage of goods.
Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”