The rich guy already lives in that society. How will he feel superior if everyone else does too?
29A robot works harder, does more, performs better and costs less than unskilled workers. A robot also does not harass coworkers or suddenly start working at another company. It would be incredibly stupid to keep hiring people who have no value to the company.
The only risk is that these unemployed proles would suddenly decide to seize the means- oh wait guns are banned
16The thing is we already live in that world. Labour saving automation is all around us but we work as hard as ever. My generation witnessed the arrival of the two parent income, women entered the workplace in order to afford better housing and foreign holidays. The result? More expensive housing and latchkey kids.
13Bottom left looks uncannily like Jeff B
4Credit / sources:
- Twitter / Nitter
Nitter RSS Feed: https://nitter.cz/kasiababis/rss - Kasia Babis | Facebook
3- Twitter / Nitter
Or, you know, we could use robots to slowly transform our society into a robotic utopia, where people get universal basic income and can do what the fuck they want, because robots do most of the work to keep our lives running.
But yeah, currently they are only attractive because they save costs. And that is attractive because we live in a capitalistic, profit driven society and not one where the well being of everyone is prioritized. (Although they can also help out in areas where human workforce is not available anyway, e.g., elderly care in several countires. Then again there are insufficient financial incentives to work in that area.) That's why it's highly probable that they will – for a long time – continue to be tools which will ease lower level work, so that humans can focus on higher level tasks. However, this level of capability is increasing over time, requiring even higher qualified humans to do very high level tasks until even those are replaced by thinking machines.
We currently have a pyramid of work. Most jobs require low to mid level education or qualification. The higher the qualification level is, the less jobs are available (but usually very well paid though). What we are going to see is that robots wil replace one by one the lower level parts of this pyramid. And that's bad, because unemployment rates will increase, because of that. A lot of people don't want to or can't improve on their education / qualification. And even if they would, I doubt that there will be a sufficient amount of jobs available. (That would be a good question for a research project though, since I don't really know how many new jobs could be created by requiring less lower level work. I am just pessimistic right now.) ChatGPT caused a lot of concerns in text writing industries. Image generating AIs caused similar distress in the creative industry. Developments like this will continue at a high speed. At some point machines will be able to improve machines completely on themselves. Then we will have an explosion of machine intelligence.
Society is not prepared for this.
That's why I am advocating that politics have to speed up creating laws and rule frameworks in which robots are allowed to be developed and operated and which also take care of those who are in danger of unemployment and financial starvation.
2"What, you guys don't have robots?"
- Related "rich elite man" after replacing all of his human workers for robots
In all seriousness tho -- robots require energy (and lots of it) in order to work efficiently. While "any ordinary human" has to pay for his own expenses. Which means, robots will be (best case scenario) a "gimmick" for a selected few and no way a popular thing, in a way that will make all humans irrelevant for ANY kind of job.
tl;dr: It's okay, robots won't take over the world.
-1
