We'll Eat The Whole Thing

My blood has backed off enough from a full, rolling boil, to partake of some reporting about AI taking all jobs

On Thursday, I got a glimpse of a post-labor future at an event held in San Francisco by Mechanize, a new A.I. start-up that has an audacious goal of automating all jobs — yours, mine, those of our doctors and lawyers, the people who write our software and design our buildings and care for our children.

And, of course since this is a 20-somethings wet dream, they admit it.

From their confession:

The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.

The explosive economic growth likely to result from completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can't even imagine today. Our vision is to realize this potential as soon as possible.

Zoweee!! Of course, no mention is made of how this transformation will differ from all previous incarnations of machines replacing man, but what the hell. Let's do it anyway. I mean, it won't be like it has always been: capitalists taking all the moolah for themselves. Will it? I mean, who'll have any moolah to buy all those fancy goods and services that AI/RL produces? Eccles did have something to say about that:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth ... to provide men with buying power. ... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. ... The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

Yeah, I'd say. Sound familiar? Did you supplement your income before 2009 with home equity? I'll bet some of you did. The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts still won't admit that he's right. Winner takes all is their notion of what's well and good for society. But never for long.

Mechanize still needs human engineers. Until AI fully automates software engineering, Mechanize still needs human engineers. Interested in helping us [Destroy your] future?

If anyone can name a time in human history when the process of machine replacing man was executed in concert with proactive re-distribution of income/wealth to the displaced humans, by all means document such.

The only reason mechanization in agriculture wasn't an utter disaster for shithole counties (mostly Red, of course) in the mid-1800s to early-1900s was that Henry Ford, et al, created new factories which sucked up surplus farm labour. Good luck with that today. It started with the McCormick Reaper, which eventually became the combine. Some historical context of reapers and combines.

And, of some interest: what would the sub-GED flesh robots, now made redundant but still paid some moolah, do with all that idle time? Write poems? Explore partial differential equations? Of course not. They'll sit catatonic, glued to TeeVee rasstlin or game consoles or just taking a pull from the jug every few minutes.