The majority of anti-tech sentiment in America has been coming out of left-leaning circles for the last five years. Go look at a video of the people protesting data centers in your nearest metropole; I guarantee you they look nothing like the caricature you have in your head.

The left tea party and left version of Trump hasn't arrived yet, but it's coming.

You mean antifa?

> Do we then stop that progress now and keep people manually collecting garbage when a replacement tech is around the corner?

No we take the tech and socialize its control

>> Yes. It removes political power. As a thought experiment, what happens when sanitation workers go on strike? What would happen if all trash collection was automated?

>> What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?

> Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.

But if they don't have work, they won't have buying power to withhold. Post AI-displacement, the economy will reorient around serving the people who still have buying power (the oligarchs and their hangers-on).

Expect demand for food to plummet and demand for dick-waving pyramids and rocket cars to skyrocket.

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The irony of comments like this is that the vast majority of people who make them would not be in the group they think they belong to.

You're still undershooting just how grim the optimal outcome of our system is. It's not going to be about 'refusal', like taking a bargain and making choices. If total automation is achieved, huge swaths of people will be placed into that bracket immediately, based largely on their luck, the country they live in and their wealth. An automated world doesn't need this many people to run itself, so only a chosen few will make it through. The rest will eventually be slowly destroyed in the most cruel ways possible. People will keep chanting "Adapt or die" until it turns into simply "Die".

Yeah, that for many people is a "AI must be prevented from happening at all because it will bring about this outcome" argument.

> I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment

I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.

> mass extermination of those that refuse

I have no words, but you sound like a dickhead.

Don’t be daft. All that man power would be excellent for bolstering the army and invading neighboring countries.

I imagine a human body will still be cheaper and more agile than robots for a long while.

It's not the fault of computers, but they changed the fabric. It was a select few of our fellow humans, who also did deregulation, financialization, and globalization. They all started at the same time and have concentrated wealth and power the last 4-5 decades.

Computers are still a significant factor because most new tasks created were cognitive and needed university education. Or another way, the automation that computers brought eliminated jobs in labor, but we did not create new jobs for those people. The three others were instrumental in that side of the equation.

Guilty... but also, I think about article up/downvotes an order of magnitude less than I click the links. I wonder what fraction of users do voting without clicking links.

What happens is that people flag content instead.

Actually, you can't unless you meet a karma threshold. I have been on this site for 6 years and I still haven't reached it because my opinions are too controversial (apparently).

I like that calligraphy example, I am afraid that's how a field would stagnate: the tools become advanced, but now with less and less people wanting to approach and struggle with learning the field, the human intuition, the community effort, and the mastery to push past the bleeding edge withers.

(Unless if AGI could do something like that.)

Stuff that used to be hard is easy.

You're blind to the stuff that's easy making previously impossible things hard.

While I agree that new skills must be learnt to survive, what exactly are these new skills in the AI-age?

I see this line everywhere - whenever someone's mourning their loss of a career, there's responses telling the person to "man up" (for lack of a better phrase) and learn new skills. Nobody says what these "new skills" are?