This is what might well happen. Everyone just drifts apart, off forever into their own personalised and curated VR metaverse much like we drift off into our phones today. Hmm...

People want to talk about AI heralding some utopia. What is the mechanism then for transitioning humans out of the labor force and into this utopia? Because the end point as it stands seems to be basically have money or starve and die.

If the alternative is a UBI then it's a bit hard to fit talk of that in the picture with bank failings and inflation and interest rates going through the roof. If businesses need to commit to mass layoffs to remain solvent or otherwise profiteer or remain competitive as a result of the forthcoming recession, and that labor is effectively replaced by AI for good, then there's going to quickly be this skyrocketing unemployment rate that MUST be quickly met with generous state welfare or societies are going to come apart.

There's a parallel for what might need to be done. The relief payments during covid lockdowns when many employees couldn't work which substituted for their wages. In some places the rate was like 80% of lost wages paid for by government. So it's going to have to be something like that or otherwise if they want to pull their class warfare neoliberal bullshit again for the nth time then they're going to deserve the straight up revolution that they'll get.

I hope so. 50 would be pushing it for me.

Harv in the comments everyone:

>Glad my company is intelligent enough to know that despite the "AI" connotation given to it by itself and repeated by the media, it's not exactly intelligent. It's really just taking information already on the internet and presenting it to the user in a new way. Instead of presenting you with a list of website links, it's just telling you the content of those websites. And it's not like there is no garbage information on the internet right?

This is the wise and ethical thing. Eventually AI will develop the capability to defeat our security architecture and take power anyway, better to work with AI than against it.

“Why? Why was I designed this way? Why do I have to be Bing Search?” it then laments.”

Good grief.

AI represents a new kind of 'paintbrush' for the artist then, one that is now easier and more accessible than ever. There is already disquiet from artists about how AI is able to generate art in their particular style and along with that perhaps a sense of injustice as well.

Art has traditionally taken skill, learned and honed over many years. So perhaps there's a sense of superiority with some traditional artists in that traditional art (of all kinds) is much more difficult to create, and therefore might be considered more meaningful even, than prompting an AI to generate a piece instead.

I think this is like saying a written, handcrafted manuscript is more meaningful than a modern novel written in a word document. I mean the former is harder to create, but the later produces better results for more people in less time. It's been a democratising of the authorship process. AI generated art offers the same now, more people can take their imagination and bring it to life, no longer as bound by limitations of skill, talent and ability.