With AI becoming increasingly integrated into “white-collar” industries, raising fears of mass job cuts, there have been calls to bring in a so-called universal basic income, or UBI — which pays people for merely existing.
However, Eberstadt warns that this would only worsen the number of dropouts in American society.
“Disruptive technologies in the past have been really great for people who have had skills,” he said. “Their productivity and incomes have gone up a lot.
“They’ve also displaced a lot of labor for people who don’t have skills. It looks like we’re going to be on that same track with AI, wherever it goes in the next 18 months or 10 years,” Eberstadt said.
“When Henry Ford came down the road, I don’t think that anybody had any idea what a combustion engine was going to do in mass-produced cars,” he said.
"But I would not like to see a guaranteed income, a UBI. Because I look at how men who are neither working nor looking for work say that they are spending their days now. And it is very depressing to see what they say they are doing. And I wouldn’t like us to be buying more of that,” he said.
“They are not engaged in civil society, not helping out around the house, not getting out of the house. Spending 2,000 hours a year in front of a screen. That’s a great warm-up act for becoming a statistic in deaths of despair,” he said.
This is basically a third of our population
I just read a report that said there are many jobs available and in my hometown, I see a steady request for help wanted, technical and other.
I also know that many people find certain categories of jobs menial such as factory work or farming. Maybe it’s an ego, perception thing, maybe because it’s hard work.
AI is taking and going to take jobs, but it would also open jobs, just look at the jobs we need right now that have appeared. Construction of data centers, water more important than ever, copper mining and refining, networks and sysadmin, energy sector, semiconductor manufacturing and many more like photonics (should reduce power and water usage.)
Yes it’s moving very fast and that’s scary. Propping things up, bailing out, however does nothing to improve the situation. Spending the money that would be incurred by UBI on training workers and providing them with equipment would be far more effective.
Short term jobs, limited workforce, no positive long term gains for the community accompanied by many short and long term problems.
If water is more important than ever because data centers need and pollute massive amounts of it?
If it is more important than ever then we should be protecting and conserving it for living things that need it to survive. Water is life.
Sounds like a lot more unnecessary pollution to create unnecessary data centers.
Data centers need remarkably few day to day operators.
The one jacking up rates for residents as data centers suck up power? Or the energy sector where the data centers use fossil fuels to power jet turbines for power generation?
Maybe. Maybe.
Should, sure, but will they really? We should live in a representative democracy, but do we really?
One, job postings aren’t jobs that are available
Two, people don’t decide they’re above jobs, jobs decide people are above them. If you’re overqualified, you’re less likely to be hired than someone who is underqualified. They automatically think you’ll resent your position and/or push for unionization. That’s too risky for most places
Three, AI isn’t going to open more jobs. If it were, those jobs would already start to take up the slack from the transition. There is nothing beyond “we’ve replaced human mental labor” in the jobs-on-deck board, my guy. Just less labor and a system unable to adjust to that reality