A Future Without Work - Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) could free us from the capitalist shackles of useless toil.
A Future Without Work
Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) could free us from the capitalist shackles of useless toil.
People here are laughing, but that just might be where we are headed. I'm from the US, so I'm sure we'll hit every branch of the tree we're falling out of before we really get there, but it is happening. The driver: AI, or what I like to call rudimentary AI. We don't need fully sentient AI to accomplish this, just something good enough. Every office job that uses a computer would then be ripe for automation replacement. And I mean every. single. one. Creative? AI has that covered. Programmer, hell you're first up against the capitalist AI wall. They hate paying you. IT, finance, all of it. Ironically, manual labor will be harder to replace because of the costs of robotics. Your first contact of support in chat and phone is already being replaced by chat bots, and that trend will continue. Cars and freight trucks are already being worked on to drive autonomously.
Soon, we'll find ourselves in a situation where we need Universal Basic Income to avoid mass starvation. From there, this vision of our future can take shape.
I think you're being very idealistic when you say that AI is capable of handling creative work. It's also not something you want an AI to do. You need humans to write books and paint pictures because that's work driven by human ingenuity. An AI isn't capable of that because its default is to rip what it sees and try to replicate it. I've heard people make the argument that humans do the same thing. This argument is misguided and reductive. It boils down human experience to something that can be automated. Our experiences and thoughts and emotions shape who we are and these are the tools with which we create our art and literature. Each human perceives the world in their own unique way and that perception cannot be automated because an AI lacks the building blocks required to build it.
We should all remember about AI that the imitation of intelligence cannot replace actual intelligence.
AI in the crude form we have it now, already creates images and music. Language is actually harder, but it is coming. It is easy to point at the misses, but there have been hits as well. And these AI systems learn and adapt faster than people think. It is just a self preservation instinct to say, "human ingenuity." But AI will mimic and surpass that too.
is this thing on?
YES!
We actually, currently, have all the tech required to do it. I actually have the opinion that we had it since the 90s if we had been willing to adapt our lifestyles to easily automatisable productions.
I have studied CS and robotics for that very goal. In my 20 years of professional experience, I have become convinced that there are very few technical challenges out there. The tech can help by just making easier what is already doable in terms of automation.
I remain convinced that the first industrial country that would start an "Apollo program to free us from the toil of labor" would be there within 10 years.
We are not there yet because the last 5% of the production line to automate is often the most costly to do, but once you reached 100% automation, that's a totally different world you are in.
Right now, incentives are set up to go in the opposite direction: you don't want your job automated, you have an interest in resisting that, often by adding bullshit layers to this job for the only purpose of making automation unlikely. If instead you gave e.g. 10 less years of work before retirement to anyone who automates their job, I am sure that we would be there extremely quickly.
I am at a point in life where I am able to devote ~20% of my work time to go towards that goal. Please feel free to contact me if you have similar goals. I want to see that in my lifetime, let's work towards it!
my preferred version of the meme, which I stole't from an internet acquaintance
Make ai do all the work while we write poems and create digital pictures
What’s the point of being rich if there aren’t any poor people to lord my wealth over?
Fantasy communism: Life of leisure for everyone!
Actual communism: If you don't work, you are a bourgeois breaker and saboteur here to destroy communism! To the hard labour camp with you, bourgeois pigdog!
I also like the Culture novels and Star Trek, but I find the FALC meme an unhelpful way of framing things as that's not a path from here to there
Or FALGSC
The Culture
I was shocked to realize that Americans (I guess) consider this universe particularly "gay". It is just a civ where sex is dedramatized and LGBTQ is considered like it should be: just as a set of preference in that simple facet of life. I mean, even the pretty conservative Heinlein describes futuristic universes where being gay is nothing weird.