Much of what you say is true, but that won't change people's lives right now, because of the needs of children and associated mortgages, etc. You point out that the need for change is upon us, but your essay on the need for change does not come conveniently packed with an explanation of what we might change to; we need a credible goal before we can begin to change our lives.
I said in the article that we should implement a Universal Basic Income
> "we can embrace AI and leverage it to free people to spend their time at their own leisure, moving society collectively up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs"
What is the point of working in the first place if not to increase our own quality of life, of which freedom and autonomy over one's time is a core component?
I guess we will have to implement the Universal Basic Income as you say, in the end. But there's no path for those whose jobs will be lost, and whose families will be at risk, in the meanwhile.
It still looks like a lot of people will come under tremendous stresses and that the human cost of change will be high.
It's clear that we're approaching the singularity, & most are drastically underestimating the impact that AI will have on society within the next couple years. Some predictions:
- Humans will not be writing code by hand in a few years.
- Workers will be expected to move "up the stack" of abstraction. Software engineers will be expected to be more high level product manager hybrids, serving more as technical business managers who delegate low level tasks to AI agents + cheap offshore workers
- Rise in generalists. Expensive specialists are most at risk since AI democratizes knowledge + power
- Gutting of the middle class, since most peoples' jobs are now very easy to automate
- Rise in AI agents. Most of what you read online including on internet forums and in DMs, you won't be able to tell if it was written by a human or AI (already the case with recruiting). There is currently an arms race in AI agent development, the results of which we'll start seeing on society within the next 12 months.
- The glory days of working in tech are over. Just like very other industry, it's only going to get more and more competitive. Salaries will at best remain stagnant. This is not specific to tech and will be the case for every industry. The industries most resilient will be those that require a human (eg. physical therapy)
The winners will be those who harness AI to their advantage, the losers will be everyone else.
I think most people are drastically underestimating the enormous impact that AI will have on society within even just the next 12 months. People are treating AI like a temporary fad or bubble, as if things will just return to the way they were before. But AI is not only here to stay, it's just getting started, and it's an arms race because everyone knows that AI will eat everything. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential growth, and most cannot comprehend how fast things are about to change.
Not trying to make this political - but I don't see any easier method of alleviating the hemorrhaging of the middle class than governments implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Humans just cannot compete with a superintelligent autonomous AI that has parsed every book and document on the internet. We can continue to be in denial of this while our citizens suffer and overdose suicide to cope with the depression and bleak opportunities, or we can embrace AI and leverage it to free people to spend their time at their own leisure, moving society collectively up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. But given how blind and reactionary most people are to this kind of stuff, I don't predict anything changes until we reach a serious boiling point, so unfortunately billions will needlessly suffer in the meantime until the masses wake up to the cosmic societal shifts that are taking place as we speak.
