I think Tokugawa-era samurai fits the description better. The Meiji era saw the samurai stripped of most of their stipends and privileges, and with little left but their pride they had to go find respectable jobs.
Effective politicians (which SA is) have by now realized that every tragedy is an opportunity to convince people to give away their rights for the vague notion of safety, as defined by them.
Not really. Automation is a tool that amplifies human productivity. It doesn't replace it--humans still have to be involved.
AI, it is claimed, will eventually make humans completely unnecessary in the production process. I'll believe it when I see it. AI is an automation tool--possibly a more sophisticated one than previous ones, but still a tool. It will still need humans to be involved.
Even if you don't believe it, it's the basic premise of the article and the conversation that we're having about the "dead economy". You don't have to believe it in order to have a conversation about it as a hypothetical, and that's the conversation that is happening here.
So if full automation doesn't happen, we have the status quo, which everyone understands already. If it does happen and production decouples from human labor completely, how do we allocate the fruits of that production?
Only with respect to some kinds of production. The article is talking about AI replacing "cognitive labor", which it defines rather vaguely. But, for example, the article does not seem to be claiming (nor are AI proponents claiming) that AI will be able to fix your car or your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks, or cut your hair, or produce food, or many other things. So it is not talking about AI decoupling all forms of production from humans.
The article does then go on to talk as if the decoupling is for all forms of production, when it talks about the political crisis that would produce. But that just means the article is going way beyond its premise at that point.
There is a better and more realistic premise that the article briefly mentions, but then skates on by:
"[F]irms are deploying...“excessive automation,” using AI to kill jobs without generating significantly lower production costs, while imposing substantial social costs. The technology, in many applications, isn’t good enough to justify the displacement it causes."
In other words, a bubble, that takes up a large enough segment of the economy to cause a serious disruption when it pops. And the pop is not about allocation of what gets produced: it's about production crashing because of misallocation of capital. But the crash in production won't be in the sectors that produce material goods like food: as I said above, AI proponents aren't claiming that AI will decouple that from humans. The crash will be in sectors where a lot of the "value" produced is already questionable anyway. It will cause disruption because there are many people whose on-paper wealth is tied up in the notional value assigned to those things, which could evaporate overnight if it turns it that it was all a bubble and the bubble pops. But there's any easy way to avoid that: don't be one of those people. Or, if you can't avoid being exposed to that risk because of whatever particular area you work in, hedge against it by not having all of your wealth tied up in the notional valuations of those things. Which is a prudent thing to do anyway.
In our local 7-11 I can find the exact same carton of milk as sold in the supermarket, and the price is also exactly the same. So it depends. Some of the other stuff sold there is more expensive, but somewhat surprisingly it isn't that more expensive, so if I need butter or yoghurt or tea in a hurry then it's no big sacrifice to stop at the closer 7-11 instead of adding the extra five minutes (of walking) to go to the supermarket instead.
So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...
You can only mitigate risk so much. At some point life is for living and there is a risk involved in it. Sequestering oneself or one's kids to home seems outright inhumane to me.
Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.
You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.
I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.
I'm not sure it's so innocent. Bambu labs is a major company that hires grads out of top US schools. I'm pretty sure they have lots of people there who understand the concept of open source, including the license requirements, and who would have been raising these questions internally.
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