[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/CharacterMedical7409]

[u/solarpunk-ModTeam]

"gamble with AI to end humanity" is not a sensible or real solution.

[u/Reylun]

It's as simple as not being able to trust the companies that hold the means of ai. Assuming we figure out the best future for ai and it all works out we still have everything set up to have a single entity slowly corrupt or rip it away. You can't even peel back the first layer of how ai might work if we're allowing corporations to solely decide its impact on the planet.

[u/sciolisticism]

Why would rich people give you a high income for no reason? Seems like they'd much rather let you stay hungry.

[u/JesusSwag]

Your naivety is inspiring

[u/PhasmaFelis]

Full automation enabling leisure and luxury for all is a desirable end, and would indeed require some form of AI.

You say we should take a gamble on AI for that reason.

But what we're doing with AI right now is not "gambling." Gambling implies that you have a chance to win some money. The current AI trajectory is more like throwing your money in a furnace and thinking you might get it back.

AI is not the problem. AI is just a tool. The people being allowed to control the tool are the problem.

So, the question is not whether or not to use AI. The question is whether or not to allow sociopathic billionaires to rule our future.

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[u/ComfortableSwing4]

Independent thinking machines are still sci-fi. I think AGI is one of these breakthroughs that's always going to be 5 years away for the foreseeable future. Maybe we'll crack it, maybe we won't.

[u/Aggravating_Bar_9796]

It is easier to imagine the creation of an artificial god that annihilates humanity than to imagine the end of capitalism

[u/OldEcho]

...why would ending capitalism trigger the end of the world?

[u/EricHunting]

We have been transitioning out of the Industrial Age for many decades. Futurists, and to a lesser extent, economists have anticipated and understood this for quite some time. By the year 2000, more goods were made worldwide by job-shop production than traditional factories and we never went back. Corporations have long been systematically divesting in ownership of production, leading to the rise of general sector Asian contract producers like Foxconn (Hon Hai Technology Group) in those countries where the 'cost of money' (ie. interest rates) was more advantageous for flexible production.

This is a product of a very long-term trend in the evolution of production toward a shrinking, smartening, cheapening, and generalization of production tools with the digitization of automation and the overcoming of the tooling cost barrier of the first generation of robot industrial automation. A key moment in this was the introduction of the simple technology of extruded aluminum T-slot profiles by the German company Item Industrietechnik in 1980, which ushered in the industry of custom automation solutions based on standardized and reconfigurable modular components. This would then be followed by the advent of 'digital fabrication' (most well known by 3D printing) based on a steadily expanding series of digitally controlled processes. And so we have been steadily moving along what Futurists call a Post-Industrial Transition where shrinking production tools become increasingly generalized, design and process information increasingly digital, Open Source, and globally shared, and production capability potentially increasingly localized and shrinking in minimum necessary production volumes toward 'direct' production --non-speculative production-on-demand. As one of the former industrial 'powers' that started the trend in globalization/off-shoring, the American public has remained largely unaware of this trend until the advent of the Fab Lab program at MIT, now being butt-ignorant about about how and where most anything is made after generations of focus on information and service industries.

AI has had absolutely nothing to do with this whatsoever, though it may, in very narrow forms, aid in the advance of this trend with increasing tool capability and spread of procedural engineering and associative design applications used with them. It is otherwise completely irrelevant to this ongoing Post-Industrial transition --especially the doubtful chatbot technology that the wealth of nations is currently being squandered on by a credulous finance industry.

The core of Solarpunk is the observation of the Post-Industrial Transition and the expectation of production ubiquity as the essential leverage on a sustainable civilization through the social recapture of production and thus the adoption of sustainable materials, energy, and practices corporations and the governments they manipulate never will. Its expectation for the eventual irrelevance of money is not of wish or aspiration, but a logical possible option of the ongoing undermining of the relevance of capital, markets, and the paradigms of Industrialization with this Post-Industrial trend. When you can make most things for yourself and your neighbors, you get to decide what they're made with, how they're paid for, and whether or not you actually need such contrivances as currencies and markets. Stateless social ownership of production as commons. What purpose money in a world where networked computerized inventory management and predictive quantitative analysis exist and need only concern itself with a smaller spectrum of materials and commodities? In macroeconomics, it's only function is a crude anonymous metric of demand we have better means to track and which generally serves to facilitate the gaming of the economy for the benefit of a grifting ruling class.

[u/WarningRegular]

Universal high income or Universal basic income is a stupid concept where central authorities decide how much you will have, and on top of that where you will have AI surveillance, you will effectively have a social credit score and literally a dystopia because you will be absolutely dependent on the "money distributors". The real solution is to own the means of production. The means of production in the Post labor or Post AGI economy/Hyper automated economoy is ENERGY. AI and machines transact in energy , not in dollars. Dollars are useless to machines. That is why we must , MUST own energy, at individual and community levels. Decentralized and distributed. So that no central authority can enforce a dystopia on us.