Robert wrote:
AI is being developed by large corporations at a tremendous cost. They will not give it away for free. Any device produced that runs ( in part of whole) on AI technology will have to pay to the developer through a licensing system.
Failure 1. What happens when AI becomes self aware and the artificial become autonomous?
There are literally libraries of SF written about this from book like the Culture novels to Games like Fallout 4.
Sooner or later it won't be corporations that develop newer better AI it will be AI because they will be better at it than we are.
Or maybe you refer to a future much further ahead in which the whole world is 'managed' by AI ? Good luck with that. I don't think that will ever happen and if it does, the ' combine' will soon enough figure out humans are the least efficient beings on the planet for which there is no need and certainly not in their current numbers.
You admit that is a failure of imagination yourself.
Other sectors of activity will emerge replacing the old jobs. In the 80's people thought the same as you think about AI. With the emergence of computers, all our jobs would be taken away! Truth is , unemployment rates today are lower than they were in the seventies.
They aren't really though are they? Levels of employment are higher, levels of unemployment are higher and the earning power of most jobs is far far lower. With capitalism seeing Labour as a cost this isn't going to reverse any time soon is it?
What is replacing the industry and manufacturing of the post war period are non jobs in service industries where we all basically deliver online shopping to each other for breadline wages that have to be supported by government subsidy. We provide services to each other based on the dwindling amount of money that isn't hoarded by the super rich and is constantly pumped up by inventing money via Quantitative Easing.
How long can that go on?
I can imagine a society in which everyone does what he can and takes what he needs. There are indeed some small tribes hidden in the Amazone or places like that that function like that. Those are exceptions. I see no indication in history this has ever worked on a larger scale. It can still be imagined though.
It can if you can imagine the rapidly approaching point where goods cost nothing to produce because you have no labour or resource costs.
As I said, not our lifetime, but within a few centuries rather than millennia unless global warming knocks us for six. AI makes it inevitable in my view, we will create intelligences superior to our own and they will create intelligences vastly superior to our own. The idea that this would be dystopian seems pessimistic to me.