New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Future Socioeconomic Impacts of automation

Ask HN: Future Socioeconomic Impacts of automation
3 by emestifs | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Once the AI overhype cycle fades, we'll continue with high probability towards a future we slowly but surely replace a lot of jobs and human tasks with automation. Whether robotics and digital automation through LLM or other "big data" driven algorithms. We can already see this happening from factories to McDonalds to software. All of these are limited, and to varying degrees. Humans still for now need to oversee these forms of automation. But the likelihood of further consolidation of wealth and power are likely to follow in the coming decades if the past is any indicator. Government regulations may or may not work effectively enough. But what happens when a significant portion of the population has no reliable work or fulfilling work. Capitalist societies need consumer spending and growth. What happens when consumers are unemployed due to automation? UBI/BI (universal basic income) gets thrown around, but it will cost hundreds of billions if not trillion(s) in the future. Companies already lobby for things, I can only imagine the lobbying will intensify a lot more if governments try to further increase corporate taxes to offset the unemployment benefits/(U)BI they will need to provide. It's easy to say, we'll figure it out. But when trillions of dollars are at stake, it seems likely they will be a lot of push back from the top N% to ensure they're not force to give away a bigger share of their money pie. What are your thoughts? Try to provide deeper and thoughtful responses here rather than shallow comments.

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