Elon Musk Says AI Could Eliminate Our Need to Work at Jobs (cnn.com) 289
In the future, "Probably none of us will have a job," Elon Musk said Thursday, speaking remotely to the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris. Instead, jobs will be optional — something we'd do like a hobby — "But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want."
CNN reports that Musk added this would require "universal high income" — and "There would be no shortage of goods or services." In a job-free future, though, Musk questioned whether people would feel emotionally fulfilled. "The question will really be one of meaning — if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?" he said. "I do think there's perhaps still a role for humans in this — in that we may give AI meaning."
CNN accompanied their article with this counterargument: In January, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab found workplaces are adopting AI much more slowly than some had expected and feared. The report also said the majority of jobs previously identified as vulnerable to AI were not economically beneficial for employers to automate at that time. Experts also largely believe that many jobs that require a high emotional intelligence and human interaction will not need replacing, such as mental health professionals, creatives and teachers.
CNN notes that Musk "also used his stage time to urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because 'they're being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI'."
CNN reports that Musk added this would require "universal high income" — and "There would be no shortage of goods or services." In a job-free future, though, Musk questioned whether people would feel emotionally fulfilled. "The question will really be one of meaning — if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?" he said. "I do think there's perhaps still a role for humans in this — in that we may give AI meaning."
CNN accompanied their article with this counterargument: In January, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab found workplaces are adopting AI much more slowly than some had expected and feared. The report also said the majority of jobs previously identified as vulnerable to AI were not economically beneficial for employers to automate at that time. Experts also largely believe that many jobs that require a high emotional intelligence and human interaction will not need replacing, such as mental health professionals, creatives and teachers.
CNN notes that Musk "also used his stage time to urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because 'they're being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI'."
Everything? (Score:5, Interesting)
if the computer and robots can do everything better than you
Like driving? :-)
More to the point, I'm sure there will *always* be things machines can't actually do cheaper, easier and/or better than humans. That will probably narrow over time, but at increasing expense / difficulty, lowering the ROI.
Re:Everything? (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, I expect that AI will eventually be able to do all jobs.
What's not clear is how to survive the transition, and who will be left standing at the end.
FWIW, I still expect a rudimentary AGI by 2035. But expect a really rough decade ahead. Some jobs need to be done that currently only people can do...and those doing the jobs won't be happy if others are paid to do nothing. (This is true even if they don't want to do nothing themselves.) Also, an AGI isn't sufficient. There also need to be capable robot bodies...which are still works in progress.
So paint his happy picture around 2040, and wonder how much turmoil lies between here and there. (FWIW, Heinlein called this period "the crazy years", even if he did get all the details wrong.)
Re:Everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Plenty and equality: Star Trek future goes here.
- Plenty and inequality: All the replicators have DRM and intellectual property is everything.
- Scarcity and equality: If the AIs are too expensive for everybody to use, but we ration its use sanely.
- Scarcity and hierarchy: The owners hoard the supercomputers and let everybody else enjoy a working poor life.
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Scarcity is not optional. It's mandatory. You can hide it partially , but you can't eliminate it.
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Scarcity is not mandatory, BUT If there is abundance instead of scarcity - You Must have some kind of system to Prevent actors from "eating up" any surplus In order to recreate Scarcity and pocket the profits from scarcity for themself.
For example.. If there is a Surplus in food, Then it would still be profitable for a Pirate to Buy up all the surplus food and create an Intentional shortage so that they can share portions of their surplus for More than the whole lot would have gone for on its own.
Re:Everything? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether scarcity is optional depends on your goals. When you just want humanity to live properly, scarcity is not only not optional, it needs to be eliminated because anything scarce will be hoarded, to the point where something that is not scarce will become so.
If you want our capitalist system to survive, you're right, scarcity is pretty much a requirement or that system is dead in the water.
Re:Everything? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is literally nothing being researched that could lead to an actual AI, let alone in 10 years. We can't create something we don't even remotely understand.
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We are, but you dont know it yet
The big research is in hardware and Quantum computing.
Once you have enough computing power to simulate 120 billion neurons and 4 quadrillion connections: the problem of simulating the human brain changes into a biology question.
The AI doesn't have to be as smart as a human to be real AI.. reaching the intelligence level of certain animals would suffice for a lot of jobs.
Re:Everything? (Score:4, Funny)
Do you have a reference for who is working on real AGI?
Also, you can have a gigajillionzillion mega neurons and a googleplex of connections yet still be nowhere near AGI. That doesn't turn it into a biology question. It remains a software question. If it was a biology issue, we already solved that: don't wear a condom, wait 9 months, voila, general intelligence in biological form!
Current AGI is non existent. No one is working in it for real afaik. I've yet to see a reference to anyone having made -any- progress.
My "AI powered" pool sweeper can barely clean the surface of a flat rectangular area and still slams into walls. I have no fear AGI is coming for us anytime in my lifespan.
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Current AGI is non existent. No one is working in it for real afaik. I've yet to see a reference to anyone having made -any- progress.
/quote>
All serious AI researchers have given up on AGI a long time ago. They all know it is at the very least completely out of reach and something really fundamental is missing. You cannot do targeted research after something fundamental unless you have a good idea what it looks like. There was some hope that neurosciences could deliver some ideas with better imaging methods, but all they have delivered is confusion how the observable mechanisms could create intelligence, because it just does not seem to make sense.
And, obviously, the usual dishonest marketing people have tried to redefine AGI to something that it is not. They did that before with "AI", which still is merely dumb automation and will remain that for the foreseeable future.
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Damn, just like that you solved the entire field of cognitive science! Wow!
That's Nobel prize stuff for sure. I look forward to your journal submission describing how that works.
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Duh, it's snark and well directed. Stealthy snark would be pointless.
I don't have to grant this stupid idea makes sense. It does not. Just because some guys got some money to try does not in ANY way mean this is the right path. Absolutely ridiculous nonsense.
So again, what progress have they made? Can they produce an AGI as smart as a person? A dog? A kitten? A rat? An ant? Anything biological at all? I don't even have to open your link to know the answer is a resounding NO! or you would have said so
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I haven't see the cargo-cult version of computationalism in a while. It's very silly.
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Yep, "cargo cult" is exactly what this boils down to. Mindless belief that some technology can deliver anything if you just believe it hard enough.
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I think you have no idea how complex the software for something as simple as a present-day computer is. And that one you can stop and look at line-by-line.
So no, it is not "just" a question of computing power.
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That is a pure hallucination on your part.
First, simulating a human brain will only ever be possible with a massive slowdown, because communication is prohibitive. There is no way around the speed of light and there is no known tech that could even remotely get that brain simulation into the same volume. If an artificial brain takes a billion times more time than a real one, it is not going to be very useful. Maybe an entirely new hardware paradigm could do it, but we do not have that. And looking at the ex
LLMs and AGI (Score:3)
Well, if you're going with "AGI is a really good LLM", okay, perhaps.
But if you're using AGI to describe a conscious intelligence (you know, what "AI" meant before the marketers starting calling thermostats intelligent), i.e. a synthetic person, no, almost certainly not. LLMs produce streams of words according to probabilities developed from their training data and guided by the input query or queries. This is why some of the wor
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Indeed. That said, optimization will kill a lot of jobs and it will not be for new products, i.e. new jobs. There needs to be a way to keep society functioning. LLMs are not intelligent in any way, but they are easy to adapt if reliability is not an issue. For many desk-jobs, it it not.
Re:Everything? (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't create something we don't even remotely understand.
Anyone can create a human level intelligence. Couples do it all the time, even if very young and completely clueless. Fuck around and find out.
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We know why it hallucinates - because it just a statistical word predictor. LLMs are language models, not AIs, and literally any word might occur as the next one in a sentence, just some with higher probability than others. It just outputs the highest probability (or you might say least worst) word. Language models don't deal in facts or memories - they deal in word statistics, so expecting factual output all the time is a wrong expectation.
A better question is why did we build LLMs if we want AI, or why ar
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AGI by 2035?
I'll take that bet. This was my field in school ~30 years ago. Since then zero progress has been made on AGI.
The odds it suddenly comes to exist in the next 10 years is extremely low. No one can even define what general intelligence and cognition really is; how can they code for it?
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Yep, same here. And there is this little problem with consciousness, which is not even possible with known Physics (there is no mechanism for it), yet clearly can influence reality, so much have some Physical form.
This believe that computers can do anything is not new, though. It nicely places itself in a long time of beliefs in gods, alchemy, magic, fairies, etc. It never has panned out in a single instance, but people keep coming back to it in new and inventive forms. This belief does form an indication t
Maybe by 2135 (Score:5, Insightful)
I still expect a rudimentary AGI by 2035.
Barring some as yet unforeseen huge breakthrough it is much, much further away than that. All current AI algorithms require training in the specific task that they are supposed to be doing. They cannot take that training and use it to do different tasks like any human or even animal can. Even the most human-sounding ones are just trained to select the next word in a sentence based on what sounds best.
Until we have an algorithm that can understand basic facts and concepts and then, using its trained skills, apply those learned facts and concepts to different situations accurately we will never have anything close to an AGI. That does not mean that "AI" is not going to feature far more in our lives because there are enough basic "single task" jobs that we can train an AI to do now or in the near future. But jobs that require applying learned knowledge to new and different situations, like scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, teacher etc are not going to be replaced by AI anytime soon although current/near-future AI could certainly assist those professions.
Desk Jobs. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if we will ever see the guys in hard hats and high-vis on the construction sites of the world replaced by robots and AI...
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I wonder if we will ever see the guys in hard hats and high-vis on the construction sites of the world replaced by robots and AI...
And, if so, will there be one doing all the work while three stand around watching and drinking coffee? :-)
saturated with people from other fields (Score:2)
Specific to your example, a lot of earth moving work is getting automated using GPS. Go search Ask Jeeves for "Autonomous Bulldozer" and you'll see examples dating back 12+ years.
Yep. Already there (Score:2)
The reason we're still using humans is that we've got a ton of disposable people we treat worse than machines.
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Driving is one task AI can *already* do better than humans. Sure, there have been some high-profile accidents. But measured in terms of accidents per mile, AI is definitely safer. https://thelastdriverlicenseho... [thelastdri...holder.com]
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Those numbers don't tell the whole story. The AI miles are all easy driving because that's all AI can handle reliably - things like driving on a clearly marked road in good, clear weather. The human driving miles contain a lot of miles in more challenging driving situations which AI isn't even capable of driving - so it's no surprise really that the human driving pool has worse numbers.
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Name one, and I'm sure you'll find someone online to argue the other side.
Ya, that's the metric to gauge validity. /s
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Like driving? :-)
Not sure why you put a smiley there as Tesla self-driving is already better than the average human [tesla.com].
I'll take information compiled by Tesla with a grain of salt. To your point, I must be better than Tesla's Autopilot (and the "average human" you mentioned) as I've never crashed any of my cars in 44+ years of driving several hundred thousand miles (197k in one alone) -- all cars were 5sp manual FWIW. Also noting that some of that data simply compares Tesla accidents using Autopilot vs. not using it -- Autopilot *is* fewer, but some have been really bad -- which is just a statistic about Tesla and their
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Also, don't forget that Tesla autopilot tends to "give up" and returns control of the car to the human if it gets in a tricky situation that it doesn't know how to handle.
If humans had the option of turning control of their car to someone smarter than them in difficult situations, I'd imagine that their safety ratings would be better as well!
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Also, don't forget that Tesla autopilot tends to "give up" and returns control of the car to the human if it gets in a tricky situation that it doesn't know how to handle.
Nice. Followed by a claim that the Autopilot didn't cause the crash but the driver did -- who didn't handle things in the remaining seconds...
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Tesla doesn't drive in the same conditions as humans. It doesn't even qualify for autonomy level 3 much less a full 5 and requires a human to keep their hands on the wheel and pay attention for when the car fucks up or can't handle it.
In other words, every single time the car turns control over to the driver is a crash event that would have occurred if the car wasn't being babysat through the hard parts of driving. My kid is learning to drive now. She can safely navigate an empty parking lot. Hasn't fuc
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It wasn't only badly run. The core design was flawed. It was an accident waiting to happen.
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Re: Everything? (Score:2)
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Yes, yes. Those poor white men. The ones who repeatedly tell anyone who isn't a white man they're not capable of doing the job or outright preventing others from the doing the job. Funny how when you stop others from doing something you end up doing it.
Oh definitely, and it's very annoying, well intentioned, and incredibly wrong. Case in point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
That 12-hour-week is already here. Without AI. At least from the perspective of the 1970s.
In the past 50 years, productivity per hour worked went up on average by 500%. 2000% in some areas. In other words, while we worked 48 hours a week in 1970, a productivity equivalent work time would be about 9-10 hours a week now.
Well? Do we work 9-10 hours a week? At (purchasing-power equal) wages of 1970?
Of course not. The productivity increase didn't mean that 10 workers now work 10 hours instead of 50 but that 2 workers instead of 10 workers now work 50 hours.
So why the hell would I think that suddenly that productivity increase would aid me to work fewer hours? All it means is that companies employ fewer people.
Huh, ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Probably none of us will have a job," Elon Musk said Thursday, speaking remotely to the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris. Instead, jobs will be optional — something we'd do like a hobby — "But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want."
Every time I think Musk is about as full of shit as a human being can be he opens his mouth and proves to us that there's still room for more.
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Never place a time limit on your prognostications. Then you always might be right... in the future.
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Key to being a futurist from Nostradamus seminal book on prophecy making is: .. make sure you stated it broadly enough that you can point to a recession somewhere as proof that it happened. .. never state how many percentage points exactly.
1. Never provide any dates. If you must do so, make sure you can contrive a success or have an excuse for it not happening. For example, if you predict an economic collapse
2. Never provide measurable specifics. For example, if you predict "the economy will crash"
3. Make a
It's happened for Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
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So really, Musk is worried that AI will be able to take over *his* job. It probably can do that just as well already.
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it's generally understood that you can have arguments with management in a healthy way
Sure. And that's why Musk fired the entire Supercharger team [reuters.com].
He knows something about the subject... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why we're supposed to take him even slightly seriously when he speculates that the jobless will still have robots providing them with goods and services; rather than just being left to either starve or get killed by the security robots is deeply unclear, however.
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Why we're supposed to take him even slightly seriously when he speculates that the jobless will still have robots providing them with goods and services; rather than just being left to either starve or get killed by the security robots is deeply unclear, however.
Just don't joke have having hair products [youtube.com] in your backpack when the security robots stop you...
[Also... wondering which character Elon would/will be in that future?]
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In fairness to Musk he does know something about what he's talking about. Absolutely nothing useful about 'AI'; but he's certainly eliminated some jobs; which counts as subject matter expertise on the easy half of his claim.
Because of Elon, we've actually seen a rise of at least two industries that were technically there but basically nothing prior to his companies existing. I don't believe he's correct about robots replacing jobs, rather they'll just change the way we do them. It's entertaining though watching the hate club deny all of it, but at the same time they're also likely the ones who will believe him on this particular topic.
Social media (Score:3)
He's made it more than clear through many interviews that he thinks that the internet and educational institutions "trans'ed" his eldest child and made her hate him, so you should tightly regulate your children's lives to keep this from happening.
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He's made it more than clear through many interviews that he thinks that the internet and educational institutions "trans'ed" his eldest child and made her hate him, so you should tightly regulate your children's lives to keep this from happening.
Uh-huh. What made everyone else hate him?
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Jealousy, spite, their own daddy issues? You name it. I bet that there are even people who google other people's reasons to hate him in order to jump aboard.
BS! (Score:2)
OK free money(Universal High Income) from the government that is BS. The US government has been bankrupt for years.
It just takes a while to burn up the accumulated capital of a few centuries.
You can not make something from nothing
I am surprised Elon does not see that.
Translation: In the future we will all be homeless (Score:3)
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The elites will not be homeless!
If they're not careful, they may end up headless though.
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The elites will not be homeless!
If they're not careful, they may end up headless though.
Ah, yes, the ol' "French haircut," know wot I mean? ;-)
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The elites will not be homeless!
If they're not careful, they may end up headless though.
You may have a point there. In my 55 years on Earth I've learned at least one thing: one surefire way to anger a man into action is to either mess up his money or his means of feeding himself or his family.
Re: Translation: In the future we will all be home (Score:2)
I recommend hanging onto books about building machine gun, plastic explosives, and rockets. Hopefully our great grandchildren won't need them, but best to be prepared.
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You misspelled "Bachelor Chow [getyarn.io]" (NOW with Flavor!).
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Huh? You actually take him seriously?
cut stuff by half and make leftovers work 60 hours (Score:3)
cut stuff by half and make leftovers work 60 hours an week with no OT pay
Why do we have the poor? (Score:2)
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My two sons are in their 20s. They both came from the same prosperous parents. Neither finished college. Both work jobs making less than $20 per hour. One is always broke, the other has $10K in the bank. The difference? How they spend money. One has a hole in his pocket, if there's money in the bank, he spends it. The other is in no hurry to spend. Guess which one has the $10K!
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My two sons are in their 20s. They both came from the same prosperous parents. Neither finished college
To feel emotionally fulfilled!
. . . and more pathetisad . . .
Do you seriously not understand sarcasm, Slashdotter? Really? Gimme back your nerd card, now! Nerdizen's arrest, pal!
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Sadly, there are plenty of slashdotters who would have written what you wrote, in complete seriousness. No, you can't assume people will understand that what you write is sarcastic, when others actually do believe the plain version to be true.
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. . . because many make really bad life decisions over and over again . . . to be emotionally fulfilled!
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and then blame others instead of taking responsibility.
Depends on what they'll charge us (Score:2)
If they can do everything better, we'll be at their mercy.
Maybe they'll do it for free, maybe they'll require 8 hours of prayer a day or maybe they'll just require us to die ... hard to predict if you don't believe alignment is possible, which I don't (even if we could agree how they should they be aligned, which I also don't).
People are thinking about the end of jobs (Score:2)
David Shapiro has a lot of videos like this: Post-Labor Economics Explained in 8 minutes - How will the economy work after AGI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
and finally, if it all falls through and the elite don't share robot labor: how to get free food for life https://www.genolve.com/design... [genolve.com]
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And it's all bunk. AI will do to office work, what machinery did to farm work, what factories did to blacksmith work. In 100 years, no one will care that all those office jobs are gone, and everyone will be employed doing something else that, perhaps, we can't even imagine today.
Re:People are thinking about the end of jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the thing, though: What kind of employment?
Every single paradigm-shifting technological advancement that displaced people also mean that these people sooner or later (sadly, often later than sooner, with the ensuing problems in between) turned to a different kind of income.
When machines started to replace farmhands and a lot of former farm aides became superfluous, they moved to the cities and the emerging factories that required the same kind of unskilled labor. When they in turn got displaced by automation, the emerging service industry took them. And so on.
What did happen with every step, though, was that the demand for the, let's say, mental capabilities of the person increased. A farmhand just had to be able to do manual work. Nearly no mental capacity required. It was already a bit more challenging for factory work, even conveyor belt work required you to understand abstract, if uniform, work steps. And in a service oriented job, you had to be presentable, able to work with people and very likely required to be able to communicate properly and possibly even read and write.
And so on.
The requirements for taking one of the "replacement jobs" went up with every iteration of the automation game.
The first step, from farmhand to factory worker, left the people out that we'd call imbeciles, who were certainly capable of tossing hay and carrying bales of corn from A to B but couldn't grasp the abstract requirement to put cog A on sprocket B. Moving on to more challenging tasks like serving food left another lot of people in the dust who couldn't communicate properly or couldn't learn how to write down an order. Moving on meant learning a trade, which again was outside the reach of a set of people.
You may argue that all these examples only exclude a very tiny portion of the population, and you're right. How many people would be unable to learn how to read? Or a simple trade? 2%? Maybe 5% of the population?
With the advent of AI, though, we displace average IQ people and push the bar for "jobs that can't be done by AI" a lot higher now. And that means we're putting a critical mass of people outside the reach of jobs.
People are not fungible. Yes, we have a severe lack of people who can do some of those jobs that AI simply cannot do. But we can't train someone whose mental capacity isn't up to it to do it.
Player Piano (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the premise of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And just as the player piano didn't put piano players out of business, AI won't put humans out of business.
Okay, then what? (Score:2)
Instead, jobs will be optional — something we'd do like a hobby ...
Material things -- including necessary things, like food and medical -- will still have a cost. How will people who opt out of work pay for that? Will there be universal (at least basic) income and free healthcare? For everyone? Ramped-up Socialism where everyone just gets what they need? Who defines "need"? What's the next step after companies fire everyone to replace employees with robots?
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If you want to have anything beyond the barest necessities you'll have to work at something.
Elon will still need flesh drones to populate Mars Colony.
Just make sure your manager is obsequious so he doesn't cut off your air supply when he fires her out the airlock
Uh huh. Not have to work. Sure thing Elon. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the 1964 World's Fair when they said productivity would be so high by the turn of the century that people would only need to work 2 or 3 days a week. What they didn't tell you was that instead of getting more time off, work would transition to service sector jobs at stagnant wages. Also that when people complain, the Jim Cramers of the world will threaten to punish you by sending even more jobs overseas. Even now Elon is threatening to move factories when workers try to unionize, ask for more wages, or states ask for his fair share of tax revenue. So who does he expect to pay for the "high universal income." Companies will spend millions lobbying Congress to make sure it won't be them. He needs to STFU.
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Good post! Needs up-voted.
"Elon Musk says" (Score:3)
Is that the new "Kim Jung Un looking at" meme?
Asking for a friend.
How do you get a $56,000,000,000 bonus? (Score:2)
If you do nothing how do you "earn" a $56B bonus?
Also if life is meaningless (for Elon) if you aren't at a desk working (he's not a WFH guy) then where do the arts and sciences come in?
He's just the definition of vapid high moron with too much money. Imagine if HE ran for President.
is AI going to finish rebuilding my deck? (Score:2)
took me a week just to redo the railing, who is going to replace the deck boards, BING?
god damn musk is just going more stupid every day
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Why the hell would that material be free? There's money to be made!
Goods and services take resources. (Score:3)
Which are increasingly becoming scarce if you pay attention to global climate change even slightly.
It must be nice to have everything you ever wanted just apparate in front of you at your every whim from birth. What a petulant spoiled cunt. Musk embodies the Hunger Games ruling class and that is the actual goal.
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The thing is, though, history doesn't quite support the end point of this development being hunger games like situations.
It usually ends in something like France 1789,
only 100 years behind the rest of us (Score:2)
The Technocracy movement in the early 20th century predicted the same thing. That as productivity increases, fewer and fewer people are needed to work in order to support the needs and wants of the rest of us. That automation would eventually eliminate labor. And one consequence is that the price system would also end, as personal wealth ceases to be meaningful. I don't necessarily agree with their hypothesis, but Elon Musk stumbling onto the idea like a high frat boy isn't surprising.
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Well, that first part was right, productivity increase led to fewer people being employed. New jobs emerged, most of them being meaningless busywork, granted.
Why that would eliminate the need or want for personal wealth is beyond me, though. Why would greed suddenly become a thing of the past? Quite the opposite would happen, since fewer people compete in that greedier-than-thou competition, the greed must increase for these people that they can stay "relevant" in that game.
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The Technocracy movement overlooked that GDP growth is fundamental to macroeconomics. That you don't just stop producing once everyone's belly's are full. We know that producing exactly the amount you need doesn't work, because the early Soviet government tried it. They centrally planned to meet exactly their needs and kept coming up short. Simple things like delivery delays in raw materials could cascade into a major annual shortfall in entire industrial sectors, as the Soviets weren't keen on building in
If memory serves me correctly . . . (Score:2)
These are the same lies we were told about technology in general.
That it would make our lives easier and wouldn't have to work as much so we could enjoy life.
Guessing we were fed this lie so we wouldn't cause trouble while the transition was happening.
And, here we are today, working more hours than ever. Able to afford even less than our parents did while working even more hours.
So, I suppose the 1% are far better off because of it but, maybe I'm wrong.
Any of you putting in fewer hours these days than the f
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The promises of the 1970s were right. "Soon, what you work in 50 hours a week today can be done in 10!"
That is true. Productivity went up 2-20 fold in the past 50 years. The more of that task could be taken over by computers, the higher the productivity gain.
What these "futurists" failed to take into consideration was corporate greed. So instead of 10 people working 10 instead of 50 hours a week, what you have now is 2 instead of 10 people working 50 hours a week.
For varying definitions of "us" (Score:2)
If he's talking about his ilk of useless C-Level spongers, I believe him. That particular type of "worker" (I'll use that term loosely here) can already be replaced by AI at the current time with the current models without any loss of quality.
Technically, most of them were already obsolete in the 1950s when the magic-8-ball was invented.
I would read this the other way around: (Score:4, Insightful)
"AI Could Eliminate Employers' Need to Have Us Work at Jobs"
Do you believe, for one second, the large companies that can reduce their workforce will pass this savings onto people who no longer work there?
To be fair, those who remain at work, will get massive wage increases. Because they either have a skill that is not yet computerized and in high demand, or are the nephews of the owner who no longer needs to pay anyone else.
It will be a very bad day if this ever happens. However my optimistic side says AI has still long ways to go before they can even return good Google results, let along fix a leaking faucet.
Arbitrage (Score:3)
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in an almost homosexual way
It's cute how you throw that word around like it's an actual insult.
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It would be for anyone that lusts exclusively after Elon.
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Only because we decide to have it that way. Money is a man made tool.
Mineral extraction is wholly tied to the labour content involved. Unlike the already overburdened environmental impacts, the minerals themselves are not rare.
Front row seating can easily be allotted by other means.
Not that I disagree. Automation is totally taking jobs right now. And money is a vital mechanism in getting people to do work. Which is still absolutely needed for the foreseeable future.
No one today will still be around to
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It's AI all the way down!
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Could also well be the other way around. If there is no scarcity of something, there is no reason to hoard. Hoarding is, by definition, wasteful. Someone stockpiles something to ensure his access to a limited resource which depletes the resource, disallows access to that resource for others and requires them to create more of it, potentially at less favorable conditions or with more wasteful production means.
That way, a "free" resource can actually mean that, with the lack to stockpile it, the resource gets