How many 10x productivity revolutions do we need? At the end of it, will there be only one person left producing everything for humanity in 5 minutes each Tuesday afternoon?
How many 10x productivity revolutions do we need? At the end of it, will there be only one person left producing everything for humanity in 5 minutes each Tuesday afternoon?
Never. There’s always more to do. Once you can produce food, shelter and entertainment with zero effort, people will start working on less urgent stuff that got ignored because we were busy working on the essentials.
Currently, we’re ignoring preventative medical and psychological care, because we’re busy fixing everything that is broken. Well, not even all of it. Just some parts get fixed. Maybe, in the future fixing stuff is so cheap and easy, that we can shift our focus to prevention.
Once we’re there, we can start focusing on the next big thing, like building a Dyson sphere or whatever.
This is completely incorrect. We’re ignoring preventative medical care and other urgent stuff to make rich people rich because we have a stupid economic system where rich people decide what is important
Well, there’s a bit of that in there as well. Maybe that example was too specific to serve its purpose.
The idea is that urgent tasks get prioritized, while everything else gets ignored. Currently, we are ignoring a variety of important tasks, because they aren’t important enough.
Once automation fixes all the urgent stuff, we’ll tackle all the less essential ones, and oh boy are there a lot of them. Some of them trivial, and some quite useful.
You’re wrong though. Things aren’t being prioritized in order of urgency. If they were, everyone in the planet would be focused on climate change. Instead, we have some places actively fighting it.
You’re talking about equality, which is a very different type of measure of urgency. Obviously, that is not being prioritized as all, because that’s how capitalism works. Quite the opposite actually. When it comes to matters related to equality, the rich people prioritize themselves over everyone else.
However, I was referring to a completely different type of urgency based prioritization that can be seen pretty much everywhere in society. We build machines that are just barely good enough for the job instead of being actually great for the job, good for the people who use them and good for the environment. That sort of long term thinking just doesn’t have a place in our current system, because making machines just barely good enough is hard enough as it is. If we could do all the basic things with zero effort, we would have left over resources that could be directed towards making everything actually better in a variety of ways. Currently, those left over resources don’t exist, because they’re tied up in making all the basic stuff happen in the society. That’s why we aren’t focusing on making things actually good.
Individual people and some companies are actually trying to make sustainable and humane decisions, but the society isn’t.
It doesn’t matter how much more efficient we get. We already have the bandwidth to do everything we need to do but if gets vacuumed up into whatever rich people want it to. That will continue no matter how efficient we get unless society completely changes.
We’ve been able to do that for about 100 years now. All of humanity’s technological problems have been solved - on paper - for generations. There’s unfortunately never been a magical consolidation period where all the hungry were fed and all the exposed were sheltered. That’s not something that automatically happens.
The technology and production capacity to raise Somalia to the same literacy, living standard and life expectancy as Denmark exists. It would just require surplus growth and production capacity to go to Somalia and not Denmark for a few generations. Example nations are arbitrary, adjust as needed.
A lot of the medical and psychological problems are caused by the “fixing” of other things.