I don’t care what one of the richest people in the world thinks about labour and work/life balance. I care what the average person thinks.

But he’s right about this.

I remember him saying that computers would make people work less by being more productive, but in the end the difference was pocketed by the rich. I don't think it's just a technology problem...

It's not a bad idea, but it also can't exist without a complete re-haul of what it means to live in modern society. Right now, replacing workers and cutting hours means people don't have enough money to live. That is not an acceptable result of automation. I'm not qualified enough to have a reasonable solution to this, but I know it needs to be addressed before we get to that point.

Yeah no shit. The problem is that capitalism hates it.

We will absolutely have automation but the workers will just be fired and all profits will be absorbed by the stockholder.

No cost savings will be passed on the other consumer either.

Assuming the owners of those machines don't restrict the people's access to that "food and stuff"

I think it's unavoidable that humans won't have enough work in the future since more and more stuff get automated.

I also think the evil people at the top knows this and are no strangers to starting wars to get rid of millions of people, when there is no capitalistic benefit for them to exist.

Crap, now all the braindead covid conspiracy theorists are going to roll this into their "15 minite cities are open air prisons" conspiracies

Sounds great. Only question is how we get paid well enough to live. A question which went conveniently unasked and unanswered.

As an end goal, with something like UBI and rescaled salaries etc … yes, this obviously true.

The catch is that there’d be a transition period, with uncertainties and states of incomplete capacity either from the AI or the implementation of the rearrangements of salaries etc.

In that phase, there will be opportunities for people or companies to acquire power and wealth over this new future. Who will make and sell the AIs? Who will decide what gets automated and how and with what supervision. That’s where the danger lies. It’s a whole new field of power to grab.

How in the world did Bill Gates go from being a scummy unethical monopolistic figure to now some trusted guru on everything? I need an explanation.

Here's what would happen in capitalist America: entities would own those machines and use them as a means of personal enrichment, it'd displace a ton of human workers, the taxes generated from profits generated wouldn't offset the economic impacts, and then half of the lawmakers would introduce bills that would provide lucrative incentives to those entities if they maintain a certain ratio of human workers and they'd staple a bunch of regressive crap onto it like abortion or whatever, it wouldn't pass because the other half of lawmakers would want to tax the hell out of profits made with those machines, government would shut down 4 times a year, Jeff Bezos builds a vacation home on the moon

When someone says technology will make your work easier, they're looking for an excuse to make you work harder.

He's ok with it as long as the machines are all running Windows, and he gets his fair share.

It would be a great idea except it's incompatible with capitalism. It would take away a lot of jobs from less privileged people and society would do nothing to support them. These people could then be exploited even harder due to job scarcity.

Would be nice though if we could have nice things.

We're already at the point where don't have to work 4 days a week tho.

it will NEVER happen as long as we live in an oligarchy in which the rich are dependent on the lower classes not only for their labor but they also need us to exist for their feelings of superiority. They need people below them to feel good about themselves, they will NEVER let us escape the wage-slave to profit vacuumer dichotomy.

As if we had a 4 day work week already. Maybe start with that?

What a stupid ass... yeah we're just gonna magically erase all the inequality that YOU HELPED CREATE because robots can make us sandwiches. Sure. That'll totally work out.

How are we going to get there, Mr Philanthropist?

So some kind of techno quasi-socialism. Sounds great. I wonder who's gonna get in the way of that, Bill?