> Democratize the machines. Public or cooperative ownership of major AI and robotics infrastructure.
If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore.
> We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization.
> Or we can be the first generation that looked at the robots walking onto the factory floor, looked at the models spinning up in the cloud, and said:
>> “Good. Take the work. We’ll take the world back.”
This article is stupid. How would Mr. Economically Irrelevant Former-worker "take the world back?" He just lost whatever power over that world that he had.
This is 15 pages of trying to put lipstick on a pig.
> If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore.
Way I see it, there isn't really a choice here. Once humanity gets to the point where they are literally no longer needed to produce value due to automation, the means of production will be - logically - accessible to all who survive. Those who don't have access will die. And the fewer the survivors, the less relevant the purpose of said means. The means will always "need" people to validate its continued existence.
> Once humanity gets to the point where they are literally no longer needed to produce value due to automation, the means of production will be - logically - accessible to all who survive. Those who don't have access will die.
And that's the part that the AI optimists in these discussions skip over. They want to talk about this new and glorious AI-infested future, but not mention the holocaust that will happen to get there. For most people, the holocaust is the only relevant part, because they'll be destroyed in it [1]. The glorious future of abundance without work is one they'll never see [2].
[1] Most likely through grinding poverty and deprivation, which is how capitalism does it. Not gas chambers or anything.
[2] That future, like you said, a smaller group. I think eventually it will roughly consist of the nepo babies of some billionaires and a smallish group of Lumon-employees (the cultists, not the severed) who must worship them to survive.
If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore.
> We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization.
> Or we can be the first generation that looked at the robots walking onto the factory floor, looked at the models spinning up in the cloud, and said:
>> “Good. Take the work. We’ll take the world back.”
This article is stupid. How would Mr. Economically Irrelevant Former-worker "take the world back?" He just lost whatever power over that world that he had.
This is 15 pages of trying to put lipstick on a pig.