One thing about the comparisons to the industrial revolution... Who does this benefit? AI makes the products worse, the user experiences worse, it makes the economy worse, it makes the environment worse, it makes IP untenable, it seems to me like we're committing collective suicide, for what? Some drumbeat of a echo of progress?
I’m living in a world I barely recognize. In the late 90’s, I was teaching myself and students how to use the WWW lol, internet effectively while researching. How to use PowerPoint as a tool by creating interactive presentations…We were working interactively with technology and now WE don’t seem to be needed, sadly.
Andrew, I've supported you since 2019, read your books, donated to both of your campaigns numerous times, and have been sounding the alarm about the automation tidal wave approaching us since the early 2010s. People are finally starting to listen, but I'm afraid we're disorganized and worse, don't seem to all agree upon a good solution.
The way I see it, the entire automation crisis can be summed up as follows: We are using technology to automate all our jobs, but not automating our survival needs.
What do we do about this? The answer is to automate our survival needs.
How do we do this? Andrew's proposal of a UBI / Freedom Dividend was a good start, because it effectively abstracts automation by just giving people the money they need to survive.
But there's a new problem which Andrew discovered in the 2020 election: Both voters and politicians (and elites) seem uninterested or unwilling to use UBI as a solution to this crisis. UBI has never really been done at this scale before, it's ambiguous in terms of funding, and voters feel like they're asking for a handout and worse are creating dependency on government money for their survival.
As a result, I think we must proceed forward with 4 key assumptions:
- (1) AI + Robotics can and will automate most jobs present and future — i.e. our human economic value plunges to zero
- (2) This will happen within 1-2 decades at most, possibly as soon as the next five years
- (3) Governments will fail to address this problem adequately before it causes extreme harm to society, risking societal collapse. In other words, there will be no UBI, no increased food rations, etc.
- (4) Elites may even become hostile to the peasant classes (lots of dark ways this can go)
So what do we do?
I have one single proposal I can offer: we automate survival as directly as possible, basically in a sortof "techno-libertarian" style format. We need to automate growing food, water, shelter, and medication for people using cheap 3D printed robotics. The goal should be to make free or near-free kits available for people to purchase. These robots will allow any family to automate their survival. The bots should be capable of setting up and managing growing crops, sourcing and cleansing water, and building shelter out of modest materials. Anyone who acquires such a robot can get the system running easily and communicate with the robot via voice or text prompts. The robots can run LLMs locally and effectively "manage" survival automation for the owners of the robot. Communities can crop up together and source their robots together to manage larger crops, water supplies etc.
I see this as a last resort, because I see no reasonable solutions left. If we do nothing, societies will either collapse or turn to communism where artificial "human" economies will be propped up in exchange for giving a dictator / party complete authoritarian control over the people. I hope I'm wrong, but I see no positive outcomes ahead on the societal level, unless by some miracle a democracy manages to pass a UBI successfully, and the rest of the other democracies follow.
Anyone else have better ideas on how we can automate our survival?
A nice idea (dream?). AI replacing office workers is here already, but cheap 3D humanoid robots are decades away. The humanoid robots now--mostly Chinese--cost $30K a pop and are still too slow and under-skilled to function in the home or ON THE FARM! Maybe in 5 years they will work well for home and farm work, but around that $30K price tag. By the time those "cheap 3D printed robots" arrive, those millions of laid off office workers will have lost their homes, and if they're lucky--be working the fields you're talking about for minimum wage.
Every time I hear about AI replacing humans, I think about all the specific knowledge it takes for the humans to create reports and maintain processes. Companies were built by humans and their systems are flawed. Real world business can operate through mistakes and sloppiness because of basic human ingenuity and actual embodiment in the system. This may play out differently in an office building that doesn’t produce any physical value, but, in a company that actually produces a product, I can’t help but think AI can only go so far. And you still need people around with intel on the system to act as coordinators and guard rails and Q&A touchpoints for the AI systems to not just chug through programming to output incredibly incorrect results. Businesses can survive and adapt because they’ve had eyes on their actions the whole time through. If AI starts making mistakes that aren’t noticed for weeks or months… how can that system recover to a point of normalcy again? Software can only keep the world up so much. Physical value is needed for civilizational survival.
One thing about the comparisons to the industrial revolution... Who does this benefit? AI makes the products worse, the user experiences worse, it makes the economy worse, it makes the environment worse, it makes IP untenable, it seems to me like we're committing collective suicide, for what? Some drumbeat of a echo of progress?
I’m living in a world I barely recognize. In the late 90’s, I was teaching myself and students how to use the WWW lol, internet effectively while researching. How to use PowerPoint as a tool by creating interactive presentations…We were working interactively with technology and now WE don’t seem to be needed, sadly.
Andrew, I've supported you since 2019, read your books, donated to both of your campaigns numerous times, and have been sounding the alarm about the automation tidal wave approaching us since the early 2010s. People are finally starting to listen, but I'm afraid we're disorganized and worse, don't seem to all agree upon a good solution.
The way I see it, the entire automation crisis can be summed up as follows: We are using technology to automate all our jobs, but not automating our survival needs.
What do we do about this? The answer is to automate our survival needs.
How do we do this? Andrew's proposal of a UBI / Freedom Dividend was a good start, because it effectively abstracts automation by just giving people the money they need to survive.
But there's a new problem which Andrew discovered in the 2020 election: Both voters and politicians (and elites) seem uninterested or unwilling to use UBI as a solution to this crisis. UBI has never really been done at this scale before, it's ambiguous in terms of funding, and voters feel like they're asking for a handout and worse are creating dependency on government money for their survival.
As a result, I think we must proceed forward with 4 key assumptions:
- (1) AI + Robotics can and will automate most jobs present and future — i.e. our human economic value plunges to zero
- (2) This will happen within 1-2 decades at most, possibly as soon as the next five years
- (3) Governments will fail to address this problem adequately before it causes extreme harm to society, risking societal collapse. In other words, there will be no UBI, no increased food rations, etc.
- (4) Elites may even become hostile to the peasant classes (lots of dark ways this can go)
So what do we do?
I have one single proposal I can offer: we automate survival as directly as possible, basically in a sortof "techno-libertarian" style format. We need to automate growing food, water, shelter, and medication for people using cheap 3D printed robotics. The goal should be to make free or near-free kits available for people to purchase. These robots will allow any family to automate their survival. The bots should be capable of setting up and managing growing crops, sourcing and cleansing water, and building shelter out of modest materials. Anyone who acquires such a robot can get the system running easily and communicate with the robot via voice or text prompts. The robots can run LLMs locally and effectively "manage" survival automation for the owners of the robot. Communities can crop up together and source their robots together to manage larger crops, water supplies etc.
I see this as a last resort, because I see no reasonable solutions left. If we do nothing, societies will either collapse or turn to communism where artificial "human" economies will be propped up in exchange for giving a dictator / party complete authoritarian control over the people. I hope I'm wrong, but I see no positive outcomes ahead on the societal level, unless by some miracle a democracy manages to pass a UBI successfully, and the rest of the other democracies follow.
Anyone else have better ideas on how we can automate our survival?
"using cheap 3D printed robotics"
A nice idea (dream?). AI replacing office workers is here already, but cheap 3D humanoid robots are decades away. The humanoid robots now--mostly Chinese--cost $30K a pop and are still too slow and under-skilled to function in the home or ON THE FARM! Maybe in 5 years they will work well for home and farm work, but around that $30K price tag. By the time those "cheap 3D printed robots" arrive, those millions of laid off office workers will have lost their homes, and if they're lucky--be working the fields you're talking about for minimum wage.
Every time I hear about AI replacing humans, I think about all the specific knowledge it takes for the humans to create reports and maintain processes. Companies were built by humans and their systems are flawed. Real world business can operate through mistakes and sloppiness because of basic human ingenuity and actual embodiment in the system. This may play out differently in an office building that doesn’t produce any physical value, but, in a company that actually produces a product, I can’t help but think AI can only go so far. And you still need people around with intel on the system to act as coordinators and guard rails and Q&A touchpoints for the AI systems to not just chug through programming to output incredibly incorrect results. Businesses can survive and adapt because they’ve had eyes on their actions the whole time through. If AI starts making mistakes that aren’t noticed for weeks or months… how can that system recover to a point of normalcy again? Software can only keep the world up so much. Physical value is needed for civilizational survival.