Hasn’t this been the purpose of every tool invented by humans since the dawn of man?
We have always sought to make life better, easier.
I think what is hard for us to grasp is not being replaced as workers - that replacement has always been welcomed as long as...
1) the jobs being taken were jobs we hated doing, and..
2) there were other more pleasant jobs for us to do instead...
But what if we don’t need to work?
Is that a silly question? Don’t think so..
Take breathing for example: it is necessary to survive, but so far at least - we don’t have to work to gather the air we breathe, nor do we have to work to pay for it.
We just breathe it for free.. what if it became that way for food, water and shelter?
What if food, shelter and other needs became so plentiful that we could just have it - and needed no salary in order to pay for it?
I submit that the biggest obstacle to that sort of life might not be the ability to produce that bounty, but rather the ability to adopt a healthy value system to replace the values of work ethic, discipline, fairness - to find a healthy way to contribute and be of service to one another.
It’s not impossible to have a life without employment - all the animals do it.
Fish swim around - birds fly around - and eat what’s in front of them - there aren’t job assignments.. none are being paid by others to do the cleanup or the processing or the distribution.. their life is their life.. it’s not divided up into work and play.
And as I said, we already live like that with respect to breathing - why not eating, why not nest building? The only reason our lives are transactional is because of the scarcity - we have to compete for what we get.
But that’s not the case with air.. as long as there is plenty all around us.
If AI has the result of making goods and services so abundant that we are all put out of our jobs, won’t it also mean that we no longer need to work for what we need - like the air we breathe?
It’s hard to wrap your head around it, but I for one would like to enjoy ‘working’ in my gardens without having to do the hard parts - the tilling and the weeding - unless I wanted to. I’d like to fix up my antique cars but not need to do the grueling expensive parts.
The bottom line is we will always be free to do ‘work’ we enjoy doing - the robots won’t take that away - they will just take away our ability to get paid to do it.. it’s only the cash transaction that will go away - but we won’t need the money.
Problem is AI can not fix my leaking faucet at home, or repair my wind damaged roof. I tried using AI to raise my puppy dog, but it gave me solutions which did not work.