@emmadavidson they're all big fans of UBI, but somehow not big fans of taxes.

@emmadavidson

After the billionaires "win," there will be no need for them of customers, no need for them of people, save for a few slaves, or however many they want.

@emmadavidson They don't need customers. They've got all the assets they can possibly want, and far more than they actually need. They'll set up a servile elite that they provide a comfortable quality of life for, and let everyone else hang.

Which is pretty much what happened for a lot of human history anyway.

@emmadavidson I assume their plan is something like:

1. Get rid of workers and maximise profits.
2. Buy essential services, land and the like, for cheap in a tanking market, and strip it for parts.
3. Build up survival likelihood for themselves, through bunkers, anti-ageing medicine, personal militias and related technology.
4. Push AI toward some version of taking over.
5. Ride out the storm without the rest of us and perhaps get to form humans 2.0 (or whatever they cutely nickname the post-singularity world).

We can see they're doing 1 and 4, they talk about most of 3 (I think Rushkoff wrote a book about it). They talk about AI takeovers. They talk about wanting to make more people like them. People just ignore it because it seems hysterical to notice.

The truly wealthy always survive the storm. These guys believe in the singularity, and they want it to happen.

@emmadavidson This is the key question. Who owns the country's resources? Are we all entitled to a share of the spoils? Universal Basic Income is the best answer imo, and the sooner the better, with so many now being affected by weather disasters. #auspol

@emmadavidson Also I think the billionaires have failed to factor in the inevitable appearance of torches, pitchforks, and guillotines.

@emmadavidson I like to consider the question in terms of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" hypothesis. It's not actually the "work" which is valuable enough to pay people for. A great many jobs are a from of "human ballast", especially the jobs AI can replace. If we really wanted to abolish those jobs, we could do that without AI. But we don't, and even if the lurid fantasies of the tech bros come true, one assumes there will still have to be jobs for people to occupy. Even if those employees do nothing productive, they can give a company influence and consideration when the government makes policies and sets regulations.

I think a part of it is that AI is meant to bring about a transfer of power, similar to the way social media transferred power from local entities to silicone valley. There are countless other examples: tourism, accommodation, classified ads, bookselling, the record industry etc., where local control has been transferred to the likes of Amazon, google and spotify.

AI is about dehumanisation, it's a sort of coup against human agency at all levels. But it is also a way of weakening the influence of institutions, be they governments, or local groups who lose control of their communications media. Their power is transferred to the tech bros, who call their novel form of tyranny "libertarianism".

@emmadavidson While this is a concern, & higher minimum wages do lead to higher aggregate demand (notably in US states with very low minimum wages), businesses that chose to have substantially higher costs thank competitors lose customers & fail.
Fortunately,
a) so far we have found other useful work for humans. Much of it "service economy".
b) machines aren't that clever - AI is over hyped. Incremental improvements are more common than successful full replacement of people. 18 months ago I saw an LLM being used largely as a rapid programming language to integrate snippets written in other languages and it was expensive to run. The project failed.

Rural towns have faded because machines do 99% of the work that was done by humans & horses ... except picking fruit & some vegetables. Road trains move twice as much per driver as semi trailers that moved twice as much as earlier trucks. Mechanisation & automation produces less expensive food.
Hacking and ransomware is a big growth industry ☹️

@emmadavidson totally agree but I don’t think they are planning that far ahead. I still hold a dream that national infrastructure would be used to bust these power imbalances, even though Aussies are now allergic to state owned stuff.