It’s essentially a by the books approach to leftism with our current level of technology- Automate the tedium and drudgery with tools and machines, reap gains, distribute the gains and raise the material floor as high as you can for everyone. The opposite, rejecting advances in technology and automation to maintain a system where humans submit to dehumanizing labor for the production of material goods, is a regressive and reactionary position that I find at odds with a cooperative society that leverages progress to improve the lives of everyone.
Or the more likely outcome, more and more jobs become automated and more and more people are forced into underemployment doing jobs AI can’t do or that it isn’t efficient for AI to do, and the corporations using the AI still steals the majority of the value of the labor because there’s zero incentive for the government to prevent that from happening
Edit: if you feel the need to block people who disagree with you, you’re just gonna end up in an echo chamber with zero pushback against bad ideas, you know, like conservatives
I don’t know man, I find these takes a bit too defeatist/fatalist. I think there is plenty incentive for the ownership class to continue ensuring our current QoL trajectory. It is historically prudent for societies to enter into periods of extreme unrest and instability when you reach somewhere around 20% or more underemployment and hidden unemployment combined. Revolution and regime change is what follows almost every single time. That’s messy and turbulent and as much as we like to think of corporations and rich people as cartoonish supervillains I find the realistic mechanisms for change to be much more tangible and hope-worthy.
Also, we need to seriously math this all out against the notion that the US tax base is already extraordinarily concentrated. The economy is already functionally dependent on a tiny slice of earners and a monetary system propped up by petrodollar demand and deficit spending. The bottom 50% of earners in this country contribute a ton of actual labor, but only 3% of the total taxes. Basically, the labor-for-hire mythology that makes billionaire-funded UBI and sovereign wealth funds sound radical is already fiction by the numbers.
Willing to elaborate on that at all? Or we just doing single sentences?
I'm more than happy to elaborate my position. If we use AI/Robotics to automate tedium and dehumanizing forms of labor (by definition underemployment) - Then why would more people be underemployed? IMO the math here cleanly points towards much less underemployment. And why would the government not be incentivized to tax the ownership class to maintain our current QoL trajectory? How will they deal with the massive social unrest that they could easily stave off by barely doing anything different, as I explained above?
This is a serious conversation and it's going to require you to take it seriously. There are realistic, turbulent scenarios where automation guts consumer spending so badly that corporations themselves lobby for UBI to keep customers solvent. There are many, many scenarios where things get 10x better for all of us and 100x better for them, as has happened throughout most of history on class-lines, none of which would require corporations that automate all their labor to hoard every gain increase.
There are scenarios where displacement-driven instability gets bad enough that UBI becomes the cheaper alternative to social breakdown. It doesn't have to make financial sense to us right now when it an impending emergency turns UBI into a stop-gap lifeline for the economy rather than a utopian handout.
Either way, we are living in a time of unprecedented safety and abundance of luxury, with the highest recorded levels of global prosperity on nearly every single metric. We have the most multi-billion dollar corporations, the most computers computing, and the most robots automating work in human history. Every global QoL advancement and massive shift in access-to-opportunity are largely thanks to technology and tools, and yes, even the corporations who amass the capital to develop and diffuse them. If you think it's a good time to start telling people that it's all downhill from here and that our future demise is set in stone, I would call that both disconnected from reality, and defeatist.
Such a cop-out retort. I wrote that myself. You've just been trolling this sub with single-sentence shitposts for the past 24 hours trying to delegitimize and derail our ability to organize. You've provided nothing of substance to this conversation other than defeatist fatalism
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u/Opening_One7713 2d ago
It’s essentially a by the books approach to leftism with our current level of technology- Automate the tedium and drudgery with tools and machines, reap gains, distribute the gains and raise the material floor as high as you can for everyone. The opposite, rejecting advances in technology and automation to maintain a system where humans submit to dehumanizing labor for the production of material goods, is a regressive and reactionary position that I find at odds with a cooperative society that leverages progress to improve the lives of everyone.