ANS -- on work and AI

I found this on Facebook.  read it.  

--Kim

Brian Skol  · 

Follow

  · 

Facebook - log in or sign up Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

There's an interesting meme going around where the general concept is that AI should be the thing doing the laundry and dishes, while the humans get to do the art and recreation, but instead it's the other way around. What I love about this meme is that I'm not sure people realize just how old of a problem this is for humans.

In Bertrand Russell's short essay, "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) he quickly maps out how the overall strategy of these industries on the whole was to tout an idea invented under Feudalism, which is the nobility of labor as it was espoused by people who had never experienced labor in their entire lives. They then make the argument that the new technology will make our lives easier and give us more time for other things. But then when the technology gives us more time for other things, that time gets filled with more work in a celebration of high productivity.

This all gets carried down to the birth of AI, and while it's being claimed that it will help us in every aspect of our lives, one can't deny the obvious of what it's already doing, which is taking some of the jobs most meaningful to humans, the arts, while making more time for us...to do more work. It's part of the cycle of technology where the people get shafted on their end, from the long standing justification of technological development.

Russell argues that we now (over 90 years ago) have a right to be idle. Humanity has built upon itself a lineage of technological advances that have given us great power, and yet instead of understanding what it takes to truly have meaningful lives, the demand for more work and more productivity has increased with the development of new tech.

So I think people have every right to be outraged by AI, it is the intelligent accumulation of the great long con invented by medieval royalty, that without hard work you would have no purpose, and so to be a true and good citizen you must dedicate your life to serving at the whims of the overlords, and you should be thankful because it's never been so great.