Today I learned +

[DrunkonDuty]

The thing is, almost nobody writes about the transitional period from our current reality to these possible futures.

We can look to historical examples, e.g. the industrial revolution.

Early I.R. the cloth industry made a lot of use of individual piece workers, roughly equivalent to outsourcing the fine manual labour, mostly (entirely?) to women. When the mechanical processes became more sophisticated and those piece workers were no longer needed they were left to starve. And starve they did.

In other words, what @overgeeked said, above.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It's folly to think the same ruthless and utterly evil billionaires who refuse to pay their workers more than the absolute minimum possible while simultaneously working them into the ground will suddenly develop anything remotely like the conscience they'd need to institute something like universal basic income (UBI) to prevent those without work from starving in the streets.

UBI in all the forms it’s been (successfully) tried is still funded by taxation.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

We can look to historical examples, e.g. the industrial revolution.

True.

But even during the Industrial Revolution, change happened piecemeal and slowly as compared to today’s rate of change.

It took from the invention of the car in 1886 to the 1930s for the automobile industry to become a serious threat to the horse-powered mobility businesses.

The first self driving car for sale to the public was in 2014. We’re currently seeing companies operating fleets of autonomous sedans, with active testing of bigger vehicles underway.

There were prototype modular industrial robots in 2012 that could be programmed to do 200 different tasks for a price + 10 year operation cost lower than an Indonesian factory worker’s salary.

That same year, diagnostic computer programs were about 65% as accurate as trained diagnosticians. That rate has climbed (though AI has introduced new challenges).

My own field (law) is seeing more tech & AI- with mixed results- than ever before. But it’s only taken a few years to go from virtually ZERO AI to familiarity with it being considered part of basic legal fluency in some jurisdictions.

See also voice acting, songwriting and computer programming.

IOW, tech replacement of human jobs NOW is faster and broader than at any previous point in human history.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

IOW, tech replacement of human jobs NOW is faster and broader than at any previous point in human history.

Without a doubt.

However, the point I was making was not about the speed of the transition but the "collateral damage." The superfluous will be left on the trash heap to die.

 

[Bohandas]

UBI in all the forms it’s been (successfully) tried is still funded by taxation.

I think what needs to happen is a move away from currency as it is currently understood, and towards something that's more like SNAP, but for everything. Coupled with the elimination of regular incomes.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Without a doubt.

However, the point I was making was not about the speed of the transition but the "collateral damage." The superfluous will be left on the trash heap to die.

When everyone is being targeted, nobody is collateral damage.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

At this point, Mr Alcatraz, I shall have to withdraw from the conversation or I shall not so much step over the line of "no politics" as fling myself violently in a catapult. ;-)

 

[Bohandas]

That same year, diagnostic computer programs were about 65% as accurate as trained diagnosticians. That rate has climbed (though AI has introduced new challenges).

I'm American. Anything that reduces the cost of medical care is fine with me

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm American. Anything that reduces the cost of medical care is fine with me

I’m American, too. It won’t.

In part because medical AIs still have the same characteristic flaws as nonspecialized others, namely hallucinations.

If a human MD misdiagnoses someone, it’s because they missed some piece of the puzzle. They didn’t ask for a particular test; they didn’t notice a symptom; they were not familiar with the disease the patient actually has, and thought it was something else.

While they’re less susceptible to some of those kinds of errors, medical AIs have been caught hallucinating symptoms, fabricating the patient receiving treatments or test results, and so forth. IOW, they introduced new mistakes- some of which were extremely difficult to detect.

 

[Staffan]

I think the Inca empire had periodic mandatory stints of government service instead of taxes. Or at least that's what they said on Extra History (although they also stipulated that there were some inconsistencies in the historical records that have come down to us)

That has been widespread and common throughout much of history all over the world. I haven't watched the video (TL;DW), but European peasants were required to do work for their lords. Wikipedia article here.

Even with that, government service by taxpayers doesn’t necessarily pave roads, repair bridges, arm & feed soldiers. Barter on massive scales is kinda self-limiting, especially as you start talking about higher tech goods.

For much of history, that's precisely what it did. One of the many things the French revolutionaries resented was corvée where they had to do e.g. road maintenance. And conscription could be considered a form of corvée.

Today's society has much more labor specialization, as well as an economy that's much more cash-based, so it's more convenient for everyone involved to tax people and use that tax money to pay people to work for the government.