I love these “AI *will* replace [x] job in [y] years” genre of posts because it’s a fun thought experiment. Taken to its extreme in writing, visual art, coding, conversation bots etc.
It’s like the future will be everybody living in NvidiaBlackrockDominoes housing, eating TysonIntelJ&J gruel, and the only employer left will be TSMCOnlyFans — which will be a staffing agency for test subjects in GarnierRevlon’s automated anti-aging research facilities.
I don’t think it’s a completely unfair scenario to imagine. If wealth continues to concentrate in to a smaller and smaller group of people, and having wealth makes it easier to change the laws stopping the concentration of wealth, what exogenous factors would stop this process?
“Technocratic” serfdom is already kind of a thing depending on how you look at it, that’s the joke.
As for what has historically led to “utopia for the ultra rich” being less-than-infinite in duration… *gestures to wars, petty infighting, boredom, gross incompetence, bad luck*
The current generation of the ultra rich might see that and argue “Aha! But we will have basically used a neural network to generate a society based off of ‘what if Kafka wrote Robocop Star Trek prequel fanfic’! Problem solved!” to which I’d say “cool”
This process is completely orthogonal to automation though. You could just as well have done this in 1822. If demand is minimal because the population is poor automation isnt necessary to kill off jobs.
The oligarchs who try to concentrate wealth will still try to scapegoat AI via mass media though, along with Mexicans, boomers, etc. or (historically), Jews.
It’s like the future will be everybody living in NvidiaBlackrockDominoes housing, eating TysonIntelJ&J gruel, and the only employer left will be TSMCOnlyFans — which will be a staffing agency for test subjects in GarnierRevlon’s automated anti-aging research facilities.