That's only because a capitalist economy uses the circulation of currency and goods as a way to multiply wealth, while motivating the people who generate the wealth.
Sufficiently advanced AI offers the potential for exponential wealth generation for our (former) capitalist overlords, without you or I needing to produce or consume anything.
Focusing on the state misses the point. The state is a relatively modern abstraction for society. Society, state-based or not, has always been dominated by class of elites and governed primarily in their interests.
However, for all of human history those elites have needed workers, and in complex societies, they need LOADS of them. The elites have always needed to ensure that the working people are sufficiently fit, healthy, motivated and skilled to do the work required.
For the last 500 years or so the elites have also found it convenient to maintain a mass of relatively affluent people with a reasonable amount of leisure time, who will purchase the products that make them rich.
Thus the typical person in the world today finds themself able to exchange their labour for basic necessities and increasingly, consumer goods. Most people receive some form of protection from bodily violence and for their property - whether from the state or from some other arrangement with the elite class. Most people also have access to some form of education and healthcare (although of course the level of provision varies massively). Most people have some amount of leisure time, some level of autonomy over what they do with that time, and an increasing range of options for leisure activities.
All of this happens because it is convenient for elites - it gets them what they want.
AI presents us with a possible future where a small group of elites could generate infinite wealth, and would have absolutely no need of the working and middle classes. The benefits we currently enjoy (however meagre) would dry up.
At best, we'd be ignored and left to scratch a subsistence living out of whatever is left of our natural environment by that point.
At worst, one could imagine a scenario where AI-wielding elites compete against each other, and need access to as many natural resources as possible to stay competitive. Then you'd suspect we wouldn't just be ignored, our very existence would be an opportunity cost for the elite class.
e.g. It's 2056 and Musk needs every square meter of solar panels he can get to ensure his AI army triumphs over Zuckerberg's. The plot of land where you've been quietly growing your potatoes and trying to stop your children dying of cholera doesn't get much sun, but it gets a bit - and that's more than enough for him to have you murdered (or, if he's feeling merciful, evicted to die of starvation).
I don’t buy your history but we seem to agree on the conclusion.
The “thus” is misplaced. Nothing was given from the elites. In two senses of the word: labor created that standard of living, elites took a lot of it, and then labor forced them to give a bit more of if back. And labor has always created that value.
And the future when labor is displaced? Does the fully automatically manufactured “largesse” of the elites dry up because the elites made it and they don’t have to give it to anyone else? No to the first part, yes to the second. Labor first created the value. Then the automation. Then they let the elite steal it wholesale.
So discussing the elites as having inherently something to give away is misplaced.
> He’s the most successful player in the most competitive position in the most competitive league in one of the most competitive sports on Earth
Isn't it exactly the point of the article though that this doesn't necessarily mean elite across-the-board athleticism?
Your statement would also have described Tom Brady for most of his career, and I don't think anyone would seriously claim he was a 99%ile athlete (certainly not for sprinting, agility, etc.)
Personally I can’t see how Brady is not a top athlete. It’s like judging a jazz musician on the skills needed in pop music or vice versa. You have to look at success within the genre or sport.
It seems like this is more about the semantics of what we mean by athleticism then?
It sounds like for you, being a top athlete simply means being very good at a sport.
I've always generally understood athleticism to be about raw physical traits, like speed, strength and agility (and is therefore only part of the range of attributes that makes up the overall profile of a sportsperson).
Out of interest would you consider people performing at an elite level in high-skill, relatively low-physicality sports like golf to be top athletes?
So many critiques of 1984 seem to boil down to "I'd really like 1984 to be a political treatise in favour of my ideology, but it isn't!"
All of the things this article says are bad about 1984 are the things that make it a good novel:
- It has a complex main character who is deeply flawed and far from an ideal revolutionary.
- It isn't especially concerned with accurately modelling a plausible political system, and instead describes an emotive representation of the author's fears for the future.
- Many of it's themes are aesthetic or subjective.
- It doesn't try to offer a concrete alternative, giving the whole thing a sense of hopelessness.
It's a terrible novel. It's iconic, I'll give you that, but there are lots of badly-written, yet iconic books. (Looking at you Bukowski) The main character isn't complex at all. There's no depth at all to Winston. He's not a revolutionary in any fashion whatsoever. I didn't realize the extent to which he was a complete author-insert until I read Johnston's essay though. I wasn't expecting a political treatise, but I would have liked a better thought out world with characters that have actual motivations. The only character with any kind of motivation at all in the whole book is O'Brian.
>The main character isn't complex at all. There's no depth at all to Winston.
Of course everyone has their own response to any piece of art but I find this criticism very surprising. Even the "takedown" article you posted pretty clearly shows Winston to be a complex character (especially in relation to the role he is cast in):
"From the very beginning of his supposed revolt against the Party, Winston simply assumes that he will not be victorious"
"Winston’s revolt against the situation is based in large part on his sense of physical disgust with icky surroundings, far more (I would argue) than it’s based on any coherent ideological or humanitarian critique... Winston is repelled more by the crappy cigarettes, and the fact that people use ugly English, and the malodorous sweatiness of Parsons, and the nastiness of the food, and the forgetting of nursery rhymes, than he is by the way the system he lives in is forcing people to live as slaves in terror of death and torture."
"Winston’s sexuality is really weird, mixed up as it is with his general uninterest in other people, his contempt for the Party and a general dislike of women"
"The closest Winston comes to thinking that there is any hope of positive social change is when he thinks about the proles; but he doesn’t know any proles, he doesn’t like being around them, he thinks they smell (of course), he doesn’t believe that they are capable of independent thought or action, and what ‘faith’ he has in them is shown to be completely groundless and abstract"
"As would-be rebels go, Winston is strikingly inactive and incurious. When Winston and Julia form their little two-person cell, do they talk to each other about the world they live in, and try to figure out its true nature, and what, if anything, they can do to shake the system? No. They have sex and drink black market coffee."
Seems like a pretty complex guy to me, and much more interesting as a character than the ideologically motivated revolutionary that Johnston seems to want him to be.
I don't think Orwell was ever a "man of ideas" and I don't think he would have seen himself as such either.
His writing is partly journalistic, partly literary.He's never really trying to assemble a coherent ideological or philosophical argument.
He's reporting what he sees and reflecting on the world he lives in and his place in it. He can see profound problems and injustices, but is deeply skeptical that any of the ideologies of his time provide solutions. But he is also acutely aware, I think, that he doesn't really have any better ideas. There's a profound anxiety and uncertainty than runs throughout Orwell's writing.
For me, this is what makes him a good writer. Judging him on not being "properly" socialist or anti-imperialist or whatever is completely missing the point.
> Judging him on not being "properly" socialist or anti-imperialist or whatever is completely missing the point.
But there are people who put him on the pedestal. His claimed by the left, and western leftists love to argue over who is "more socialist" than the other. His time in Spain, books like Animal Farm and 1984...they're held up as examples of Orwell being a better leftist than others.
I don't think it's funny because it's "strange". It's funny because it reminds people that they can have very different inner worlds to people they share their life with.
But people already know that? Everyone knows men and women think about very different things.
But I guess it is similar to the old meme where a woman worries why the guy is so distant that day and if he doesn't like her any longer, and the guy is just thinking hard about why his motorcycle isn't starting.
But that explains it: it is funny the first time you see it, but these differences aren't funny when you already are aware of them. Everything is a first to people. So I don't find it funny since I have seen similar things many times before and have grown tired of it, while others here finds it funny since it is new to them.
But talking to my friends who do these jobs it always seems like it would be even more vulnerable to AI than programming.
Experienced electricians get paid decent wages because they have had lots of training and then have seen loads of different problems. So they intuitively know things like 'This is a 1960s house so if there's a problem with the lighting the first thing I should check is the fuse box connector, it should look like xyz, etc. Etc.'. This seems like exactly the sort of thing an LLM could do for them.
I think you could easily see a world where an electrician is someone on minimum wage with very minimal training who blindly connects wires as instructed by an AI.
I reckon the safest jobs are ones with limited reliance on knowledge and a very high level of physical skill (in environments where it's hard to get machines to operate). Bricklayers, plasterers and painter/decorators will be the big earners of the 2050s!
I wonder if there's enough info about how to do tradesmen's jobs online for that to happen. Programmers are at risk because we filled the internet with free training materials but many jobs aren't like that especially anything with a physical component.
This is an interesting point. A family member of mine is what we call here a medical evaluator - not sure if it has a direct equivalent in e.g. the US and how it is called here, but those are doctors who assess the disabilities of workers who apply for a pension due to illness or accident. This involves exploring the patient and then making the decision and justifying it in a report. The latter two seem like tasks that LLMs should be able to do easily.
However, we tried a description of a fake case to see what Bing could do, and it couldn't do much. And I think the reason is that there are very detailed documents on the rules that they follow for their decisions, but these are not online - they are in a private intranet and they can't take them out of there. If Bing had access to those documents I don't think it would have much of a problem.
So maybe a way for workers to protect themselves from being replaced by AI is not uploading much information about their jobs to the Internet... I wonder if this will lead to a situation like guilds in the middle ages, treating job skills essentially as secrets.
I don't know if it is enough yet but there has been an explosion of this kind of content on Youtube over the last 10 years. For typical home repairs it seems most topics are pretty well covered.
The most recent electrician jobs we've had done were:
- fitting a timer into the switchboard to control the hot water cylinder. A simple job, but the sparky also had to talk to me (the client) to get us both on the same page.
- fitting an EV fast charger in the garage. Not much science, but a lot of cable running and clipping down, then the garage switchboard needed to be swapped out for a larger one that could take the required RCD. And convincing me which brand charger to go for. 2 guys working together for a couople of hours.
- fixing the range hood light (always on due to a broken switch). He spent quite some time trying to extract the broken switch, with the range hood balanced on his shoulder and wires everywhere.
In every case there was no real complexity to the job, not the sort of thing that an AI could have been helpful at at all. Just a lot of common sense, knowledge of the regulations and much skilled manual work.
I don't think AI is coming for electricians any time soon.
But in all of those cases presumably someone needed to figure out what needed doing? (In your case maybe you're savvy enough that you knew what the issue was and just needed a certified person to do the work, but most clients won't be).
My argument is that it is the 'figuring out' that drives electricians wages, not really the doing part. Because while clipping down cables and extracting switches is fiddly work, I'd argue it isn't a skill with enough barrier to entry to maintain high wages (as compared to brick laying or plastering, for example, which you simply can't do to a professional level without years of practice).
So most of the value delivered by an experienced electrician is in talking to clients and identifying the correct technical solution, and is therefore pretty much analogous to the value delivered by software developers.
Therefore if we accept the logic that software developers will no longer be required (or that their value will be greatly diminished) it's hard to see how that wouldn't apply to electricians too (in the sense of being a well-paid trade over and above your average manual job).
(Btw - I DON'T think either will happen, but I just think electrician is a weird choice of example for those that do think that)
There is no reason to expect robotic technology to halt. Look at what things like Tesla or Boston Dynamics robots can do. Eventually we will see very well articulated and high strength to weight ratio robots integrated with advanced AI systems. It is definitely not going to take 25 years.
If you look at what's happening today, in 25 years it seems plausible that fully autonomous superintelligent androids with much more dexterity than humans will be fully in control of the planet.
There is though. In Europe finding a plumber that will take you can have you wait weeks pricelessly because those sinks in existence keep breaking down.
The safest jobs are ones that honest to self for the doer. He/She will be able to create value either using other humans, or machines and continue to do.
Sorry, I wanted to try "safest jobs are ones that involve politics", while those will always be present, it is not the safest and wont be many available, so changed to more abstract answer.
This isn't really true. The article talks about apprenticeships. While traditionally apprenticeships in the UK were mostly for blue collar work, these days you can do apprenticeships in almost anything: software engineering, law, medicine, management, etc.
Sufficiently advanced AI offers the potential for exponential wealth generation for our (former) capitalist overlords, without you or I needing to produce or consume anything.
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