...Red Sky at Morning/Sailor Take Warning...

Times they are a changing. And of course this has been true for a long time. However, the abilities of AI are now at a stage wherein such abilities equal and exceed human abilities in many domains where human creatures have actual jobs and derive satisfaction from creating value. No less a personage and high-tech expert than Bill Gates is sounding an alarm. Please read his article which can be found here

The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.

https:// www. linkedin .com/ pulse/ turbulent-ai- era-here-choices-we-make-now- critical- bill-gates- kkmze/

If the in-text link does not serve. then copy the above “text” into your favorite browser search box and take out the spaces. There are jobs — potentially millions of jobs (!) which are absolutely going to go away forever. AND yet there is (high) chance that economic productivity will continue to be high and rising.

If we do not plan ahead adequately, a very few, already-rich people will capture the vast majority of the value that gets created by AI-based automation of the information economy, while literally millions of actual people lose their jobs with little chance of finding an equivalent job in some other part of the economy. It is all going to get done “cheaper and better” very shortly by AI.

It does not have to happen like that, but if we do not realize that there are two edges to the powerful sword which is AI and make some changes and choices before the tsunami hits, there could tremendous widespread pain and panics.

There is amazing upside potential, but we have to realize that there are “hidden dangers of the rainbow”, and beneficial results will not seamlessly, automatically be distributed across white collar and blue-collar millions, without leadership from below. The politicians and business leaders are pretty much clueless, and we have to create our own lifeboats.

I personally believe that we will need new forms of collective ownership of AI-based productivity— NOT AT ALL what DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) are talking about— rather something new that is both collective and mass-ownership driven… not “labor unions” of old, but rather “capital unions” of some sort, everyone owning AI collectively together and sharing in the boon somehow…

What does that mean? Shucks, I flat do not know, but the real problem is that nobody else seems to have a clue either. And most of our political leadership do not even see the downside and the danger looming. We need to discuss and invent new things, perhaps new ways of organizing; that are both practical and workable. It will necessarily be rough, but it has to be ready and working for all of us “Joe Six-Pack” folks— people who will be out of our jobs before we know what has hit us.

Trust me on this part: We definitely do not want to be relying on Congress and state legislators to be coming up with power-driven, quasi-socialist, bullshit laws, and regulatory answers, while our unemployment runs out with not even one slim chance on God’s green earth of ever getting another job like the one that we had before.