I think the difficulty for many people is not imagining a path to post-scarcity, per se, but instead that they have been given no commitments by their government or business leaders that they will get to benefit from it, after it is achieved.
It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector.
To which those employees respond: What will happen to us?
And they are told: things will be great, you won’t need to work in the factories any longer, and we will have no shortage of goods.
Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”
Well, historically, it's sort of worked out on its own. Automation displaces workers but also creates new jobs in other sectors. We have maintained full employment at higher wages.
That said, some displaced workers have experienced substantial difficulty moving to other industries, especially if those new jobs are in different cities or countries. And it is also possible that this time is different, although I'm not convinced.
That can work as long as consumption can increase infinitely to meet increased production. Unless consumption continues to increase, we will find ourselves unable to produce those new jobs in other industries.
But said history was not peaceful. Business leaders repeatedly attempted to use these transformations in tons of ways to screw over workers - for example, the only reason we no longer have lots of small children being mangled or killed at their factory jobs is because of workers who protested against unsafe working conditions and child labor. I see no reason to expect anything better from our corporate overlords of today, who are generally gleefully supporting fascist movements, or getting involved in illegally decimating government programs.
Given how much control capitalists have over almost every mechanism for organizing, I don't even know if such labor movements would still be possible today.
> Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”
This process will take generations. Over time, people will work less and less as productivity steadily increases (we already see this in the pre-AI era as technology has accumulated). Eventually, AI will do all necessary labor and goods/services will be incredibly cheap. Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.
Also, it's possible that this technology just doesn't pan out. There could be a bottleneck or a nuclear war or whatever. Maybe it just stops scaling, or it stays in the realm of text-generation and can't replace manual labor. But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
> This process will take generations... Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.
I think the crux is in how fast you think the technology is developing. The widespread view in Silicon Valley is that drop-in remote workers will be a reality within a couple years. Sam Altman is already claiming that AGI has been achieved [1]. Jack Clark from Anthropic puts a >50% chance on recursive self-improvement by the end of 2028 [2]. This is an enormous sector of labor being made redundant in a very short amount of time.
So the actions taken in this specific administration over these next few years become pivotal. The industry is unregulated and currently undergoing explosive growth in a way we haven't seen since the railroads, in entirely the wrong direction to Sanders' interests. He is a major player in the political process, so of course he will take measures to get things under control.
> But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.
That's why the bill is about "temporarily pausing" development, not banning it forever.
This is to say nothing of the catastophic risks that the bill is actually mostly about, not just the labor disruptions.
It’s one thing to say something like: AI will enable lights out manufacturing and replace virtually all employees in that sector.
To which those employees respond: What will happen to us?
And they are told: things will be great, you won’t need to work in the factories any longer, and we will have no shortage of goods.
Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”