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170 points bookofjoe | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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lenerdenator ◴[] No.43644555[source]
> One wonders what Asimov would make of the world of 2025, and whether he’d still see artificial and natural intelligence as complementary, rather than in competition.

I mean, I just got done watching a presentation at Google Next where the presenter talked to an AI agent and set up a landscaping appointment with price match and a person could intervene to approve the price match.

It's cool, sure, but understand, that agent would absolutely have been a person on a phone five years ago, and if you replace them with agentic AI, that doesn't mean that person has gone away or is now free to write poetry. It means they're out of an income and benefits. And that's before you consider the effects on the pool of talent you're drawing from when you're looking for someone to intervene on behalf of these agentic AIs, like that supervisor did when they approved the price match. If you don't have the entry-level person, you don't have them five years later when you want to promote someone to manage.

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mandmandam ◴[] No.43644670[source]
> if you replace them with agentic AI, that doesn't mean that person has gone away or is now free to write poetry. It means they're out of an income and benefits.

That's capitalism for ye :/ Join us on the UBI train.

Say, have you ever read the book 'Bullshit Jobs'...

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lenerdenator ◴[] No.43644767[source]
> That's capitalism for ye :/ Join us on the UBI train.

The people with all of the money effectively froze wages for 45 years, and that was when there were people actually doing labor for them.

What makes you think that they'll peaceably agree to UBI for people who don't sell them labor for money?

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mandmandam ◴[] No.43644969[source]
> The people with all of the money effectively froze wages for 45 years

Yep. And they didn't accomplish that 'peaceably' either, for the record. A lot of people got murdered, many more smeared/threatened/imprisoned etc. Entire countries get decimated.

> What makes you think that they'll peaceably agree to UBI for people who don't sell them labor for money?

I don't imagine for a moment that they'll like UBI. There is no shortage of examples over recent millenia of how far the parasite class will go to keep the status quo.

History also shows us that having all the money doesn't guarantee that people will do things your way. Class awareness, strikes, unions, protest, and alternative systems/technological advance have shown their mettle. These things scare oligarchs because they work.

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1. Philpax ◴[] No.43645110{3}[source]
I am hoping that will be our saving grace this time around as well, but my fear is that the oligarchs will control more autonomous power than we can meaningfully resist, and our existence will no longer be strictly necessary for their systems to operate.
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2. someguyorother ◴[] No.43653706[source]
The dark humor in this is that any such technologically advanced future where humans have a meaningful say will eventually look like one of abundant luxury communism: it's just that the oligarchs' version will have a lot of people die first before the oligarchs enjoy their abundance.

The third option is that the oligarchy fully internalizes its pursuit of ruthless concentration of power. But in that case, someone will probably create an AI that's better at playing the power game, and at that point, it's over for the oligarchs.