By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Any discussion of what I’m about to talk about must address the huge MAGA elephant in the room — it’s very possible that we may have to go through something along the lines of WW3 before we reach any sort of Singularity, petite or otherwise.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Trump somehow doesn’t manage to kill about 1 billion people when he is re-elected and in an effort to remake the global order in his image causes WW3 to break out. Let’s say we continue to have relative peace and prosperity.
It definitely seems as though by about 2030 that some combination AI and android technology make totally upend and disrupt the currently human-dominated service industry. There would likely to be an number of unexpected side effects.
The most obvious is, of course, a real push for some sort of Universal Basic Income. I could see this being paid for by some combination of a 30% vat and the taxation of the economic activity of non-human actors. (Though I know some Objectivists who think ANY taxation is theft, even if the “thing” being taxed isn’t even human. Ugh.)
The other, less obvious side-effect of the wide spread use of AI and androids would be that there would be no DDD jobs for undocumented immigrants to fill. Now, apparently some conservatives are soooooo racist that they somehow think that undocumented people will still come to America even if they’re going to starve to death because there are no jobs for them.
But, I think any reasonable person can assume that if all service jobs and all DDD jobs are done by AI androids that, well, that might single-handedly solve a few macro problems in the American body politic. There’s a reason why Japan has been obsessed androids for decades — they knew they would need them because of a lack of new babies.
So, if there was a snap, massive rollout of AI androids in the US it’s possible that the weird bending of in America’s political system that has caused MAGA to warp everything might subside and we might go back to “normal.” Or not, maybe things will just get worse because the plutocrat oligarchs who would control the AI androids would use those very same androids to control the everyone.
Ugh.
