> Should these impossibly rote and dehumanizing kinds of jobs exist, or shouldn't they?
The question that precede this one is “should we care for people’s basic needs like housing, healthcare, food, etc?” In America, the answer to that question is largely “no” from which all the dehumanizing work then follows. Many conversations about AI on this site seem, perhaps intentionally, to elude this reality.
People aren’t angry at the prospect that these awful jobs will be taken away, but that their baseline survival will be made more difficult so that a handful of already wealthy people can get even more rich.
As a very smart man once said, "It took both time and experience before workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments."
We've forgotten the lesson and we have to relearn it. The problem isn't AI - the problem is the owners of capital, who will be abusing and exploiting workers with or without AI. AI as technology is a wonderful achievement and the product of a great deal of proletarian intellectual labour, built on the intellectual labour of society as a whole - it is ours, and it is fantastic once we restore control to its rightful owners. Unemployment, homelessness, lack of healthcare aren't caused by AI, they're caused by an economic system which demands unemployment, homelessness, and which throws in the lack of healthcare for free. Accordingly, we cannot prevent unemployment by fighting AI - it has never worked in history and it won't work now, like fighting the mailman to "prevent" a court summons. We have to identify and fight the root cause, not the tools that both we and they use or will use.
The question that precede this one is “should we care for people’s basic needs like housing, healthcare, food, etc?” In America, the answer to that question is largely “no” from which all the dehumanizing work then follows. Many conversations about AI on this site seem, perhaps intentionally, to elude this reality.
People aren’t angry at the prospect that these awful jobs will be taken away, but that their baseline survival will be made more difficult so that a handful of already wealthy people can get even more rich.