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A Future Without Work - Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) could free us from the capitalist shackles of useless toil.
(antoniomelonio.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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People here are laughing, but that just might be where we are headed. I'm from the US, so I'm sure we'll hit every branch of the tree we're falling out of before we really get there, but it is happening. The driver: AI, or what I like to call rudimentary AI. We don't need fully sentient AI to accomplish this, just something good enough. Every office job that uses a computer would then be ripe for automation replacement. And I mean every. single. one. Creative? AI has that covered. Programmer, hell you're first up against the capitalist AI wall. They hate paying you. IT, finance, all of it. Ironically, manual labor will be harder to replace because of the costs of robotics. Your first contact of support in chat and phone is already being replaced by chat bots, and that trend will continue. Cars and freight trucks are already being worked on to drive autonomously.
Soon, we'll find ourselves in a situation where we need Universal Basic Income to avoid mass starvation. From there, this vision of our future can take shape.
I think you're being very idealistic when you say that AI is capable of handling creative work. It's also not something you want an AI to do. You need humans to write books and paint pictures because that's work driven by human ingenuity. An AI isn't capable of that because its default is to rip what it sees and try to replicate it. I've heard people make the argument that humans do the same thing. This argument is misguided and reductive. It boils down human experience to something that can be automated. Our experiences and thoughts and emotions shape who we are and these are the tools with which we create our art and literature. Each human perceives the world in their own unique way and that perception cannot be automated because an AI lacks the building blocks required to build it.
We should all remember about AI that the imitation of intelligence cannot replace actual intelligence.
AI in the crude form we have it now, already creates images and music. Language is actually harder, but it is coming. It is easy to point at the misses, but there have been hits as well. And these AI systems learn and adapt faster than people think. It is just a self preservation instinct to say, "human ingenuity." But AI will mimic and surpass that too.
Unfortunately, that's not how these AI work. It's important we look at the misses because they make clear what AI can't do and critically analyse the hits. It's easy to look at a hit and think that it's smart but that's exactly what it wants you to think. ChatGPT relies on your expectation that it will give you a smart answer and it's very good at fooling people into thinking that it knows what it's talking about. AI are still prone to hallucinations, making contradictory statements and making errors. Creative work has nuance and is carefully constructed by the one creating it. You can't ask an AI to interpret its own work because it doesn't know what it's doing. It knows of H.P. Lovecraft's work and how to imitate it but has no concept of why Lovecraft wrote what he did. This is the same with any author. Midjourney can replicate Van Gogh's style but there's no intent or purpose behind it so the end result is a great imitation but has no value to offer because it has no perspective from which it creates.