2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
There are two main AI scenarios; near-term extinction and near term non-extinction. The dice have been rolled on that, it is difficult at this point to predict which one will happen.
The extinction scenario is irrelevant in any cultural or economic context; discussion of it is meaningless unless you are counting on joining Yud in one final moment of ecstatic vindication before oblivion.
Within the ‘non extinction’ universe, then, it seems likely that in short order all of the activities we currently classify as labor (indeed pretty much all of the activities we do in general, though maybe that is less relevant) will shortly be done by AI or by cheap, mass produced robotics guided by AI.
There are a few reasons why, in this scenario, I do not anticipate a permanent state of mass unemployment (in either a negative Marshall Brain style or positive Elon Musk style - though there is minimal difference between them).
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Many white collar jobs are already invented. This includes both millions of public and private sector jobs. Since the end of the Second World War and the development through the 20th century of manufacturing automation and the emergence of computing hundreds of millions of jobs have been artificially invented by a combination of regulation and direct and indirect government spending in sectors like education, healthcare, finance, law, actual public employment working for government and non-government (but funded directly and indirectly by it) and quasi-government organizations, old age care and more.
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At the same time, the band of one’s working life has narrowed out of the average human lifespan - we start working full time much later (often in our mid twenties instead of mid teens) and retire at a similar age while living much longer. This and the above are quasi-deliberate state policy to maintain a broad level of employment, and the incentives for this will continue to be present.
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Humans will always compete in games of status. Status involves reward. It seems extremely unlikely that tens of millions of high status people around the world - and the PMC is the demographic that largely invented and controls AI, in terms of background class - will accept a status on the level of an unemployed single mother in the trailer park living off Universal Basic Income. They will invent new games of status and ensure they are rewarded for them, and the best way to do that is beneath a veil of quasi-meritocracy, just as it is in our current system. There is nothing people with minor status fear more than having that petty status taken away from them or otherwise limited (see cops and customs officers). Most politicians and tech people aren’t generationally super rich, they’re from and of the upper middle class, and man mostly serves his class.
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The incentives of mass UBI + full unemployment are extremely poor from a governing perspective. People respond to incentives. Currently, one of the main incentives that keeps gainfully employed people in line and law abiding is the risk of life ruining unemployment. Even for the semi-employed, a stint in prison can be life ruining precisely because of its effect on one’s employment prospects. In a wider sense, the fact that if you work hard, you can escape the squalor, dirtiness, and shabbiness of the underclass is the central incentive for working hard. If everyone gets ‘paid’ the same check at the end of the month, why not be disruptive in school? Why not commit minor petty crime regularly? Why not engage in endless antisocial behavior? If you work hard your whole life only for Commissar Elon to throw you into section 8 with the addicts and degenerates when your software engineering job gets automated by Grok, you are more likely to revolt than your new neighbors. The automated sentinel killer drone police fascism squads won’t appear or be sanctioned immediately; as we unfortunately just found out, democracy of a sort still exists in America, for better or worse.
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The actual logistics of transitioning to UBI are economically painful and there is no easy way around it. What happens to debt? What happens to mortgages that UBI doesn’t cover, or indeed ones that it does? Who gets the nice apartments, the fancy hotel rooms? Do they all go out of business? What happens when consumer confidence and spending collapses? What happens during the panic? What happens when the financial system collapses in a huge credit crunch? The education system - especially colleges and vocational schools - immediately collapses because nobody thinks they can pay back loans and because education no longer leads to any opportunity. Universal unemployment plus UBI runs into many of the same problems as, say, suddenly transitioning to Full Communism, which has historically been economically fraught, except even more extensively damaging to economic activity.
The solution is obvious. We’re going to work invented jobs, brought into being by legislation that will be no less banal than New Jersey banning you from pumping your own gas. Every contract has to be reviewed by a human for at least one billable hour per x pages. Every bank loan has to be reviewed by at least one human for at least y time. Every line of code in commercial software has to be reviewed by a human for at least t seconds. Every company audit has to have one human auditor for z months for every $10m of revenue up to $100m and then every $100m thereafter - there, I just saved lawyers, retail bankers, software developers and accountants in four sentences. You can figure out the rest. If anyone seems to publish a huge piece of commercial software with a suspiciously small 2 man company the government just says “seems unlikely you guys reviewed all 3 million lines of code yourself” and levies a ruinous fine and bans your tool from sale or distribution, maybe even for free. Obviously all this is draft stuff, but you can increasingly close loopholes until essentially labor costs are forced onto all productive enterprise. When it comes to public sector employment, of course, you don’t even need that.
To smart people like those here, many of these will seem laughably fake because they are (although many of our jobs already are). But most will accept them quickly. In many ways, they will be no more fake than many of the jobs that already exist today!
2rafa
2d ago
You can’t sacrifice 2028 because immigration is cumulative and the most conservative Supreme Court we will ever see in our lifetimes just voted 6-3 against repealing birthright citizenship. You can never remove anyone, certainly not anyone’s children, and remember the president can admit unlimited (yes, unlimited) legal refugees without. congressional approval.
2rafa
2d ago
I’ve argued some version of the broader thesis for years here. I think life likely exists elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps even in the solar system, but we probably hugely overestimate the probability of intelligent life. In any case, even if the critics’ arguments are overstated, the odds could merely be ‘moderately’ low and we may still be the first.
The argument against this eventually comes down to “it seems unlikely”. But fantastically unlikely events happen all the time; only earlier this year a commercial jet plane crashed out of the sky and into a building, and yet a man walked out unscathed. Why shouldn’t we be the first, at least in as large an area of space as is reasonable?
2rafa
4d ago
I thought the difference was that book republishing is subject to centuries of established law specifically about reprinting printed works, whereas digital copyright law is very recent and incomplete, so the ‘perpetual license’ served as a blanket assertion that resale (or copying and distribution for free) was prohibited.
2rafa
4d ago
If you bought the cart for $70 and then played an emulated version on PC (whether or not you ripped your own copy) I would consider that much less morally objectionable, but I’m guessing you did not do that.
2rafa
4d ago
That’s facetious, this is a complete remake that seems to have been made largely from scratch by hundreds of people. If someone spends $100m remaking a movie from 1950 that is free on YouTube I don’t see why that would justify not paying to see the new version.
2rafa
4d ago
Isn’t the only reason these licenses exist because they provide the legal framework to challenge piracy in court? Otherwise, I could simply copy my “digital product” and sell it to fifty thousand people, right?
2rafa
5d ago
It seems like this Zelda is a well made and reviewed game, I see no reason why the creators shouldn’t be compensated. Life involves thousands of decisions in which one can be pro or antisocial at little or no cost.
2rafa
5d ago
I think it’s vulgar to pirate games (I assume you’re not ripping it from the cart). Call it a matter of honor. If one must do it, it is best not to mention it.
2rafa
5d ago
Shapiro is far too Zionist, he’s openly Zionist, proposed in Jerusalem, tried to ban support for BDS etc, he’s never going anywhere now. Ossoff has moved around on Israel but has been somewhat critical. There is a nebbish energy around him though.
2rafa
5d ago
In general I think this kind of argument is weak from the right.
Some of these women wear the hijab but they mainly do it for cultural reasons, this is a second generation Indian American psychiatrist from an upper middle class family whose husband is overtly pro LGBT, gay marriage, etc.
Clearly he’s more religious than, say, Mamdani, who is basically atheist, but El Sayed is about as religious as Sadiq Khan, which is to say that he is hardly an Islamist.
2rafa
5d ago
Which is also why Sarah Jukaku almost certainly having been subjected to female genital mutilation is also not readily talked about.
Sarah Jukaku is an Indian Muslim. FGM is quite rare in that population, and she doesn’t belong to one of the groups of Indian Muslims (who are quite heterogenous) who practice it.
2rafa
6d ago
It was legally clear that Greece could crash out of the Eurozone in 2011. They chose not to. The legal analysis from the Troika more broadly, the ECB specifically and the European Commission all said they could - what rule prevented them from doing so?
2rafa
7d ago
Maybe. But DeSantis will look ugly and fat on stage next to slick Newsom. In the battle of the white guys, glistening California will beat sweaty Florida. It would be a campaign with almost zero policy, a lot of traded insults, some macho posturing on both sides, and then Newsom would win.
So in this scenario they quietly or overtly threaten him with impeachment (ie supporting an inevitable Dem impeachment vote) and he pardons himself for absolutely everything, then resigns to give them what they want.
He then spends the next two years talking about his betrayal. All the while, the Republicans are still in control of the presidency, his base is completely fractured with many more conspiratorial supporters thinking he was backstabbed by Epstein RINOs or something, and they lose in a landslide in 2028.
Vance cannot win a presidential election, or probably even a primary.
2rafa
7d ago
Part of the problem for Vance and any other Republicans who are performatively distancing themselves from Trump is that a substantial proportion of Republican primary voters still mostly like him and are unlikely to hate him before 2028.
Not only can Trump blame all problems between now and 2028 on a Democratic congressional majority preventing him from doing anything (and he will be persuasive to enough people in doing so) which will ensure he retains at least a core loyal base, but he will also (i) respond extremely poorly to criticism from inside the party and (ii) will be very public in endorsing a preferred candidate or candidates.
This means that even if a Trump-skeptical candidate wins the primary, which would be difficult, they are likely to be heavily bruised by a primary campaign in which he will feature as a looming presence. Trump, who remains a vindictive and capricious person with little loyalty to party, would then also likely criticize them throughout the actual presidential campaign period, reducing turnout in his core boomer base and making an actual victory almost impossible.
In the alternate scenario, if a Trump-endorsed candidate wins the primary, he will require Trump at rallies and in media more broadly to drive turnout among his base to win, which means that he will never be able to criticize him even slightly, and in turn that obviously means that he is unlikely to win swing voters.
2rafa
7d ago
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
Vance is widely hated and has to try to defend his future candidacy against Rubio (who despite being both more neoliberal than Vance and more in favor of the Iran War will be perversely less associated with it than Vance simply because Vance is uniquely ugly and unlikeable).
Neither are likely to win the 2028 nomination, which will be a bloodbath that will end in a compromise candidate rejected by Trump (who will endorse Rubio or someone even more venal), after an early primary defeat for Vance, lobbied against by the outgoing candidate, who will easily lose to Newsom or (god forbid) Ossoff.
[Ossoff would be the worst thing to ever happen to American Jews, so I can only cope by hoping he loses the primary race]
2rafa
7d ago
California is actually possibly better placed than a lot of other states; boomer greed has made a lot of socialist initiatives hard to implement, Mexicans are more centrist than FOB Guatemalans, Haitians and Hondurans, and the demographics of the three big cities are better than a lot of big East Coast cities. Local governments are powerful, even LA has cities like Beverly Hills and Irvine where they actually enforce the law.
They also have, like Illinois and Michigan, a Democratic machine that is so corrupt that it actually serves as a kind of bulwark against the DSA / socialist lobby.
2rafa
7d ago
It is completely legal for a Eurozone country to trigger article 50 and leave the European Union and therein the Euro. This can be triggered by any national government, just as it was in the UK, although obviously that didn’t involve the Euro in that specific case (nevertheless, the legal mechanism would not be different).
2rafa
7d ago
The ‘weapon’ in the case of opposing socialist policies is that international investors (governments, private asset managers, whatever) might voluntarily choose not to lend to you anymore. The ‘weapon’ in the case of opposing right wing policies is that they just…block you from doing them with no recourse by ruling them illegal.
As you note, they are not the same.
2rafa
7d ago
Sorry, you signed economic treaty #142495 with the international Fuck You Organization. That's actually illegal. There will be a fifteen-year court case in some international court run by countries that hate you, and in the meantime the bond market has decided you're actually a major lending risk. Look, I'm sure you'd love to manage your own country's economy, but the rest of us have decided that it's not really in our interests for you to do so, so please give control over to our team of experts so they can carve you up and take it all for themselves.
This isn’t actually true, though. Even in cases where, say, the EU and ECHR protect some private property rights (and therefore expropriation without compensation) it’s easy for there to be ways around it. For example, you simply issue a new currency and print money to pay property holders at a laughable official exchange rate, giving them cents on the dollar, then briefly switch to using euros or dollars, then issue a new currency. This would require crashing out of the Euro and possibly EU but this, again, is perfectly legal - Syriza strongly considered it, but decided against it because it meant a lot of economic hardship. You can even do it more easily than this by passing entirely legal laws that make some sectors non-viable commercially, destroying enterprise value, buying them from investors for nothing, then restoring their pricing power - for example - again fully legal under the ECHR as long as you have some kind of environmental or other reasoning. The same goes for defaulting on government debt, which any treasury can do by just…not paying the coupon for a relatively short period after which the markets consider it in default - this doesn’t require any special authority. Now, again, progressive governments might choose not to do it, because a lot of socialist economic policy is actually very very stupid and bad, but they could.
By contrast, stripping say 5 million people of citizenship at once and mass deporting them isn’t possible with a simple majority in most of Europe.
2rafa
7d ago
Two reasons:
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Even if the Republicans win a legislative / congressional landslide in 2028, it’s very unlikely they’d win back a majority, almost impossible.
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Trump will still be president until 2029, so will remain an unpopular incumbent and ‘in charge’ on Election Day for voters.
It’s already over. Next Democratic administration equipped with a majority will naturalize millions and open the doors to millions of ‘climate refugees’ from Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Refugee numbers are set by the President, he can literally make them five million in a year, ten million even. There is no mandatory cap.
I agree that Brazil is now the best case scenario.
How about this - Le Pen wins, pulls a Meloni, governs to the center, nothing happens. She makes some performatively mean statements about Islamism, deports a few thousand illegal migrants, conducts a few heavy-handed national police raids on drug dealers in the banlieues of Marseille and in St Denis, for which she is widely condemned after footage is published showing the police beating up some second generation Algerian woman just bringing her shopping home for what seems to be no reason. Other than that, Le Pen allies with other parties in parliament to give more handouts to retirees and lower the pension age, presides over a huge economic crisis, then leaves office in a wave of unpopularity.
Forcing assimilation in France, CCP Style is coup complete. Actual large scale remigration (which some on the right have fantasies of) is probably revolution complete. Neither have any chance of happening.
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