Comment on Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where 'machines can make all the food and stuff' isn't a bad idea

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r00ty@kbin.life ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I think ultimately this is going to become the crunch point. Because what kind of jobs can AI eventually take over (with appropriate robotics) in the mid-term future?

Now, when it comes to industrial and farm work. There's a LOT that is already semi-automated. One person can do the job with tech that might have taken 10 or more now. I can see this improving and if we ever pull of a more generalised AI approach, more entire roles could be eliminated.

My main point is, we're already at the point where the number of jobs that need people are considerably less than they used to be, this trend will continue. We know we cannot trust the free market and business in general to be ethical about this. So we should expect a large surplus of people with no real chance of gainful employment.

How we deal with that is important. Do we keep capitalism and go with a UBI and allow people to pursue their passions to top that up? Do we have some kind of inverse lottery for the jobs that do need doing? Where people perhaps take a 3 month block of 3 day working weeks to fill some of the positions that are needed? I'm not sure. I suspect we're going to go through at least a short period of "dark age" where the rich get MUCH richer, and everyone else gets screwed over before something is done about the problem.

Looks to me like Gates is looking ahead at this.

Sorry if that wall of text sounds pessimistic. Just one way I can see things going.

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