The coming social apocalypse...

[zaj]

Last edited Thu Aug 29, 2019, 09:39 AM - Edit history (1)

https://m.hindustantimes.com/world-news/billionaire-jack-ma-says-12-hour-work-week-could-be-the-norm/story-aOqXiezZkv6IgrYnsXIF8J.html

Jack Ma, founder of tech giant Alibaba, the Chinese mega-company that's like Amazon+PayPal+eBay+WhatsApp+Yahoo all rolled into one. He's one of the richest men ever, spoke along side Elon Musk at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

He predicted a 12-hour work week thanks to Artificial intelligence, automation, and reduced need for human labor.

--

So Ma seems to unintentionally predicting a 70% cut in industry demand for human labor thanks to AI.

Cool.

I think even basic economics suggests that with a 70% drop in global labor demand, it would mean that...

Today's world of fully employed people at 40 hours per week will be over 3x as many labor hours as necessary, so...

The job market will be flooded with underemployed people...

Pay rates will fall...

Un- and under- employment will be massive and widespread...

Job shortages and pay decline will collapse living standards...

Poverty rates will explode...

Demand for social services will overwhelm the system...

People will fight over scarce resources...

Consumption of produced goods will fall...

Living standards will decline...

Demand for social safety net programs will explode...

The western culture of ambition, drive and innovation will begin to erode...

Broadbased access to wealth will shrink...

Income distribution will shift dramatically away from everyday people...

Ability to fund social welfare programs will depend on massive tax hikes in the rich...

Greed and centralized power will collapse Democracy...

Wars over wealth distribution will dominate everywhere...

Huge numbers of people will die...


--
Did I miss any aspect of the coming social apocalypse as predicted by Jack Ma + Basic Economics?

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

1. Last sentence...

What can you say about it?

“I don’t worry about jobs,” Ma said on Thursday, making an optimistic case that AI will help humans rather than just eliminate their work. “Computers only have chips, men have the heart. It’s the heart where the wisdom comes from.”

[zaj]

12. Wisdom is accumulated knowledge...

This just goes to show that expecting successful business people will know what to do to mitigate our social problems just because they are successful business people... Is kinda nuts.

Some are brilliant, but there are a lot of other thinkers we must listen to

[theophilus]

21. Wisdom is Knowledge tempered with love, imo. n/t

[WheelWalker]

27. Wisdom lies not in what you know; but, in knowing what you don't know.

[empedocles]

2. Did you miss civil 'unrest'?

[zaj]

13. I thought I had it covered...

... Between...

People will fight over scarce resources...

Greed and centralized power will collapse Democracy...

Wars over wealth distribution will dominate everywhere...

But you could definitely add that b explicitly.

[Locrian]

3. he's *completetly* missing what AI is/will be really used for....

It allows for very easy *MONITORING* of everyone and controlling workers.

AI will be used to not so much *replace* (although yes, it does that) it will be used to watch over new class of slaves (us) and control and manipulate them as work slaves, manipulated consumers, control dissent, etc, etc. THAT is what AI will be really "useful" for.

Its an authoritarian ruling class' wet dream

[Cosmocat]

4. Chinese schools

have cameras all over the place, and scan everyone in the classrooms every 10 or so minutes with facial recognition software that assesses if they are on task or not.

That is happening now.

[Locrian]

5. yep and wework

continually monitors their slaves - I mean workers - in real time.

then there's the whole "social media credit score" thing...

[zaj]

14. I disagree...

So will be used for a lot of things, and it's definitely being used for surveillance, but labor automation is at the center of natural effects. It will naturally be how it's must used.

[Locrian]

20. and all the displaced workers ...

And all the displaced workers ...

will have to be controlled and monitored, if not used as sources of value to extract (prisons, pharmaceutical, etc) - AI will be the most efficient way to accomplish that. It will be universal: whether you're employed, unemployed, a dissident, etc you *will* be monitored and commoditized.

Labor will jump on the bandwagon - but it won't be a long term solution unless the rest of it is implemented.

[3Hotdogs]

6. Make cheap shit. OK.

Who's gonna have money to buy the shit?

[RKP5637]

7. K&R!!! The major point was missed. The current carrot and the stick model will be obsolete. n/t

[zaj]

15. We are all socialists....

If not now, then soon

[brooklynite]

8. If "everyday people" don't have money, they can't buy the products made by AI

[Autumn]

9. Yang's Universal Basic Income isn't sounding so bad now.

We can always eat the politicians so there's that.

[OilemFirchen]

10. That relies on a VAT.

The resulting economy would be a Cat and Rat Ranch:

[Kid Berwyn]

11. Perhaps we can add the lobbyists and the Ownership Class?

Not so much for sustainability, but for seasoning.

[Mersky]

33. Hehehe, yeah.

[zaj]

16. Yep, Yang's campaign is by far the most important

He's the only one running who seems to grasp the nature of the point in history we are living

[Autumn]

17. He understands the future.

[jeffreyi]

18. Agree.

Read his book. An eye opener.

[lame54]

19. Exactly why Andrew Yang is right

[kentuck]

22. This is coming quicker than any of us realize.

The only way to manage the coming crisis is thru government action.

Markets and competition will become mostly obsolete also.

Government will find it necessary to create jobs. Roads, trails, and infrastructure will keep a large proportion of the population busy.

But government will have to become more socialistic. They will have no choice. New ways will have to be discovered on how to use more leisure time.

Big changes are coming very quickly.

[Johnny2X2X]

23. It really takes a deviation from today's paradigms to appreciate the scope of change

The construct around AI is Man vs AI. As in, an AI will replace a man's job. That's not the whole of it. AIs will be so advanced in the near future, that 1 AI with the requisite processing power could replace an entire industry's worth of workers.

So for instance, instead of having an accounting department at a company, I can have 1 accounting administrator and a year's subscription to some super computer enabled accounting AI that processes the accounting for most businesses nationwide.

And when a certain creativity threshold is reached for AIs, they'll replace nearly all engineering jobs.

Automation replaced non skilled and semi-skilled workers by the millions. AIs will replace skilled workers.

An AI is defined as software that can write itself. This means that soon AIs will write other AIs to solve different types of problems. And that AIs will solve problems in ways that humans could never imagine.

How we deploy this technology to the benefit of society is the paramount issue of the next century.

[Yavin4]

24. Or we could embrace Socialism and share equally in the benefits of AI

Just a thought.

[kentuck]

25. The wealth from Google and Amazon, etc could have been distributed much better....

..instead of permitting so much wealth to go to one person or a family.

Wealth re-distribution thru tax policies.

[dchill]

26. The rich will get richer...

The poor will get dead.

[guillaumeb]

28. Recommended.

Ma, like Jeff Bezos, is a greedy sociopath who thinks he is divine.

[Auggie]

29. Feudalism, Part 2

[former9thward]

30. One problem with the theory.

It is not coming true. We are at the lowest unemployment in 50 years and companies have been automating everything for decades now. Where are all the unemployed people?

[zaj]

38. Technology evolves exponentially...

... what we have seen so far is the gradual part of the hockey stick curve.

[Initech]

31. Hey conservatives, it's not illegal immigration that's coming to take your jobs. It's automation!

And the people who profit from automation.

[louis-t]

32. Those are Republican 'economics'. Republicans are not economists.

They are ideologues. They have a bunch of stupid ideas written on a piece of paper. "If you do 'A' then 'B' will happen. None of it works. It's Republican utopianism. It's wishful thinking. What they are really saying is: "if only things would work this way, it would be a perfect world."

[PETRUS]

34. We could very well face many of the problems you list.

But I doubt it will be for the reason you cite. In spite of all the hoopla we're hearing about automation, the fact is that productivity growth has been quite slow in recent years (far less than it was in the decades following WWII). While it's theoretically possible that there will be sudden, rapid gains in productivity, the current data don't support that. And given that we're in ecological overshoot on several fronts, I think there will be problems implementing and sustaining new technology in the coming decades. Between climate change and resource depletion, I'd be surprised if industrial civilization continues its "progress" for much longer.

[Act_of_Reparation]

35. I predict that in the future there were will be fewer paragraphs.

And more ellipses.

We will all speak in Haiku.

[Ilsa]

36. Sounds like a detail from the Sci-fi story, The Expanse.

There aren't enough jobs to go around, not enough training to be done.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

37. This has been being predicted at least since the 1950s.

Details vary over time, but the threat of "automation" had a lot of people scared 60 years ago.

Yeah, the jobs people do are changing, not often for the good. But this sort of apocalyptic prediction is neither new nor very likely to come true.