No, they are not approaching a problem. Rich families can simply afford to have a nanny for their children while, the dwindling middle and lower economic strata of society will be working as nannies for the rich. This is a symptom of a fundamental inequality that will only keep getting worse as a smaller work force will have to support a growing population of retirees.
That and you shouldn't discount the natural urge to have children. Your typical
Interestingly, people in rich countries (both men and women) want more children than they actually have. Turns out that prosperity and education do reduce the desired number of children, but that "target" of how many kids they want to have comes short of reality due to how expensive and time-consuming children are. It comes at around 2.4-2.8 ideal number of children vs the below replacement line of most OECD countries.
What does this mean? Left to their own devices, people will in general have an "above replacement" fertility rate and the population numbers will keep growing. Modern society leaves that desire unfulfilled.
Steve Jobs said it best.
When a company first starts, it's the engineers who make all the decisions because their work is driving sales. But when everyone already has a phone/computer/laptop, it becomes the task of salespeople to drive up sales. They end up earning promotions, and the company ends up with people at the helm who have no idea what the words Design and Engineer mean unless they're used in a sales pitch.
Yes, but AI is just a tool. It's not there to convince people that the sky is red or that it's there to change people's beliefs. I use "AI" a lot in my work, but that's mostly for the menial tasks I would have hired someone to do.
The easy code I would have had a junior write, or corporate emails and reports we had the secretary do. Those simple menial tasks were the domain of those who wanted to do them, and were an entry point to the company for the newbies who wanted to put a foot in. Now we had them all automated away.
The general answer everytime I talk about this with colleagues is "People will just do the more complex tasks". But how many engineers do we really need? How many senior engineers can there be when we don't need the junior ones, anymore? And, most importantly, how will we transition there? I can think of a million different tasks we hire people to do that could be just automated away, but what will we do with all the people who used to do them? Do we pay for their training? Do we just tell them "Get better skills" and leave them hanging?
"Good enough" will be the new name of the game, where you need experts to handle all the nitty gritty side of things, while anything that can be used when it's "good enough" will be made by AIs.
The problem is that "Good enough" was the domain of people, learners or those who were simply okay with that. What do we do with all of them, now?
Boy do I have a story for you, then. Entire books were written on this subject as it's the textbook example of an ad campaign that entirely transformed a product's image but, in two words: Marlboro Man.
In fact, that was the moment the "influencers leading to people taking up smoking" part of tobacco companies truly solidified itself as they realized that, instead of selling cigarettes as a healthier alternative to rolled tobaco, they would sell it to teenagers as the Masculine Ideal they should aim for. Hell, even the red and white shape on the packet's packaging was designed to remind people of military medals.
The history of the creation of Marlboro Man is so interesting that I would advise anyone to read up on it
Reminds me of tobacco companies when they started advertising filter cigarettes as a healthier alternative to non-filter cigarettes. Their sales plummeted because their own campaign reminded people that the winning move was not to play. If you were choosing the lesser of two evils, you wouldn't choose evil at all.
Am afraid that once we start picking and choosing, we will all quickly realize that not much of what modern society produces is bringing a net positive.
Modern economy is built on the idea that human desires are infinite, and they know best how to use our finite resources to satisfy them. I wonder what kind of economy will an AI be able to create for us if asked.
And even better, it didn't evolve through millennia of social pressure, and so never learned that some things, even if you think them, are not "facts" because the statistics "proves" them.
Like the dozen different examples we had of AIs who will turn racist/homophobic/sexist as soon as racial or gender statistics are offered to them.
It's not even a classic cyberpunk setting, it's a story old as time. Every culture, tradition and religion has stories about the "good guy" who lives in moderation and the "bad guy" who embraces excess.
And it seems that, with our economical prowess, we're able to satisfy every material need tenfold. But somewhere along the way lost sight of our human needs, even if our need for a tribe never truly disappears.
The people who laugh at sports teams fans and call them cave-men, then turn around and fanatically proselytize Apple products will never cease to make me laugh.
But what if it DOES work? Am like you on this and, if anything, these exclusives simply encourage me to sail the seven sees and find whatever show I want to watch without paying a dime.
But... If they keep doing this... Maybe it DOES work? We don't have access to the numbers, but maybe whenever they release a new show with a big name, they get a sudden spike of new paying accounts?
Am honestly trying to make sense of this because, unless it's actually working, they are legit burning through money for nothing.
They wouldn't be THAT stupid, would they?
With the Palestine/Israel thing going on right now, the amount of AI generated images I saw is staggering. I could tell it was AI made because I use it, myself. Meanwhile, my friends keep forwarding me photos of "the horrors" where the truly horrifying thing is the number of extra fingers the mutilated person has.
People grew up relying on the news and on photo evidence as the undoubted truth-bearers. It will take a while for everyone to adjust.
Damn, you already changed your password from "changeme".
You're overqualified.
In the words of George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
That's already half of humanity right there.
Indeed. Facebook and Instagram are exactly the same, designed by committees and the finest engineers to make them as addictive as possible.
If you're going down the rabbithole of which social media to ban, the truth is that all of them should get banned.
You still have to wonder what sense is there to hold a "Friends, Love and Peace" music festival right next to a fucking concentration camp.
That's the mindset of people who watch the bombings of Ukraine, add to their facebook profile pictures a blue and yellow filter, and call it "Helping the cause".
Congratulations! You are the one-millionth user to log into our system. If there's anything special we can do for you, anything at all, don't hesitate to ask!
