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A Future Without Work - Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) could free us from the capitalist shackles of useless toil.
(antoniomelonio.substack.com)
Or FALGSC
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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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.
I see your point because I also don't think it is necessarily particularly "gay". However, I think The Culture is always mentioned in reference to the FALGSC meme because it is one of the best examples in fiction of such a thing. And with respect to that, I view the adjective "gay" in said context as more-or-less just meaning "not influenced by cishet supremacist thought". Just my opinion though and your mileage may vary!
I agree and understand it, just wanted to say that it is as weird to me to call it "gay" because it is not homophobic as it would be to call something "black" because it is not racist.
I feel you.
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!
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.
Unfortunately, that's not how these AI work. It's important we look at the misses because they make clear what AI can't do and critically analyse the hits. It's easy to look at a hit and think that it's smart but that's exactly what it wants you to think. ChatGPT relies on your expectation that it will give you a smart answer and it's very good at fooling people into thinking that it knows what it's talking about. AI are still prone to hallucinations, making contradictory statements and making errors. Creative work has nuance and is carefully constructed by the one creating it. You can't ask an AI to interpret its own work because it doesn't know what it's doing. It knows of H.P. Lovecraft's work and how to imitate it but has no concept of why Lovecraft wrote what he did. This is the same with any author. Midjourney can replicate Van Gogh's style but there's no intent or purpose behind it so the end result is a great imitation but has no value to offer because it has no perspective from which it creates.
Make ai do all the work while we write poems and create digital pictures
my preferred version of the meme, which I stole't from an internet acquaintance
Ok what do you want me to automate for you?
Can you automate the search for a purpose?
While(1)(
Instruct_human_to_listen_podcast(rand(ted_talks))
)
A robot which automates what I ask it
Hi.
Hello. Can you please automate a robot for me that will automate what I want, before I ask it, please and thank you.
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