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anglesideside1 t1_j0l9a9b wrote

Reply to comment by gmoney1259 in The Reality of Universal Basic Income Future by Prototype47

We’ve lived through an industrial revolution already. Sure there were socialist movements and luddites who hated the machines, but for the most part we all adapted to those new opportunities. It’ll happen again.

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StanielBlorch t1_j0lruw0 wrote

I think OPs desired solution to this ghastly situation of people not having to labor for the profit of their betters would be the same as the Victorians came up with: the workhouse.

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radicalceleryjuice t1_j0mbmxf wrote

The Luddites didn’t hate all machines, they only hated machines that were designed to deskill the working classes.

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anglesideside1 t1_j0mdzbj wrote

Dey took ‘er jahbs!!!

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smooshie t1_j0mpdhg wrote

And if they had succeeded in their goals, everyone but themselves would be worse off for it.

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radicalceleryjuice t1_j0ms62k wrote

How so? Do you know what their goals were? They wanted to have a say in how technology was being designed. How would that make things worse?

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spellbanisher t1_j0nc8zd wrote

>We’ve lived through an industrial revolution already.

Your direct ancestors did, but hundreds of millions did not. To obtain food for its urban populations, as well as raw materials, Great Britain and other European countries created colonies around the world. Recent estimates have found that British colonialism (again, driven by industrial revolution) caused 165 million excess deaths in India from 1880-1920, and life expectancy declined from 27 to 22 years. That's a lot of people who didn't live through it.

Even in western countries the industrial revolution was brutal for most people who went through it. In the United States life expectancy declined from 44 to 37 years between 1790 and 1860. Again, a lot of people who didn't live through it.

Eventually society may adapt (although the past is a terrible predictor of the future), but we don't have to let the AI revolution decimate several generations. It took a lot of activism, organizing, and political struggle to make industrial society humane for most people: decolonization, the municipalization of sanitation, the regulation of working conditions, the universalization of education, the creation of welfare states. As anthropologist Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation, the commodification of land and labor tends towards their annihilation. It was countermovements to commodification which made industrial society broadly livable.These things didn't just happen. People had to struggle and fight for it..

This is why the deterministic attitude towards AI is so detrimental. It makes people think that, hey, things will just work out because they did in the past, ignoring that people in the past fought to make things work out because they didn't assume that they simply would.

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anglesideside1 t1_j0nhmba wrote

Oh people are definitely going to die in any transition. Never said it wasn’t going to be easy. People thinking we can just sit around and get paid is the fallacy in all of this. Sorry…we’re all actually surviving here. It just doesn’t feel that way because our lives are so cushy thanks to all of our modern amenities and amazing infrastructure.

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gza_liquidswords t1_j0oe3y5 wrote

>Sure there were socialist movements

You should read about socialist movement, and how they eliminated child labor, provided worker safety protections, 40 hour work week, overtime protections etc etc

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