How I Discover Positivity in AI’s Taking of Jobs – Cyber Tech

I responded by saying one thing like:

A special member then responded with:

This is a crucial level that gave me loads of pause. I responded within the thread and we had an extended dialogue there, and I’ve now turned my response into this essay beneath.

The explanation I can see “optimistic” in any of that is that I feel it is type of the flawed query.

The query assumes we’ve got the choice of sustaining the previous. If the query is,

“Which might you favor, the power for people to withstand know-how and maintain working their previous jobs the place they spend 8 hours a day shifting paperwork round, and so they’re paid barely sufficient to lift a household, or new AI-driven world the place most of these jobs go away?”

I feel lots of people will say, sure, let’s maintain these jobs. No less than it is higher than nothing. However that is not the selection we’ve got.

AI is coming not as a result of we’re selecting it. We did not select studying. We did not select the web. We did not select smartphones. And we aren’t selecting AI. These items are merely occurring. It is the phantasm of selecting or rejecting the long run that is producing anxiousness, or no less than, it is exacerbating it.

The stoic choice we’ve got (not within the impassive sense, however within the true Stoicism sense) is to simply accept inevitability and discover the utmost variety of methods to profit from it. On this case, I feel the advantages are clear.

We’re being prompted to maneuver previous a world during which we spend 8 hours a day doing what David Graeber referred to as “Bullshit Jobs.”

We’re transitioning right into a scenario the place the silliness of spending all this time (most of our necessary waking hours) doing issues within the service of capitalism and cash, turns into apparent.

There’s loads of good that got here from Capitalism, for certain, and it continues to assist carry folks out of poverty. Nevertheless it’s not sustainable for a human-centric life-style going ahead, and particularly after AI.

Folks solely have jobs within the capitalist mannequin as a result of capitalism wants them to have these jobs. Capitalism, i.e., capitalism’s short-term want for human staff, is the one cause we have had all these jobs all this time.

Put one other means, if capitalism solely wants 2 folks to run a 200,000 individual enterprise, capitalism will stress naturally to get to that magic variety of 2 folks. That is not a human system. That is a capitalist system. And AI is just permitting capitalism to optimize.

What we want is a human-based system that does not collapse primarily based on capitalism changing into much more environment friendly. Which means human flourishing primarily based on human strengths. Love. Connection. Human relationships. Sharing. Collaboration. Joint Creation Initiatives. And in the end a human-centric world.

So, to present a brief model of this very lengthy reply, the advantage of 80% of jobs going away as a result of AI is that it reveals the underlying flawed nature of what we had earlier than. And it permits us to begin constructing, and transitioning to, one thing significantly better.

Sure, 100%. The transition goes to be horribly nasty. However here is the factor. Mindset issues. We have now a alternative of seeing this because the lack of an amazing and great factor, and the transition to a dystopian hellhole, or seeing it as a 100% inevitable transition from a capitalism-centered world to a human-centered world.

We are going to expertise 100X the trauma by decoding it because the lack of an ideal, lovely factor vs. seeing it because the lack of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. So let’s try this one. That is what I imply once I say lean into it. See the optimistic of the opposite facet. Look in direction of it. And strap in, as a result of it’ll be actually powerful.

However I feel it is our job, for folks like us, to assist folks see the optimistic narrative and never the damaging one. As a result of that distinction makes the distinction between experiencing short-term wrestle in service of a rare optimistic, vs. experiencing a horrifically traumatic and damaging expertise akin to the dying of humanity.