Automated Dystopia

Prompting source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/01/199242/qr-codes-replace-service-staff-as-pandemic-spurs-automation-in-us

Never to be a fearmongering type of person, but there is a terribly obvious global crisis looming basically over the coming century.

Roughly 50 million years ago, humanity began growing, and reached 3.5 billion people around the middle of the twentieth century.

In only a handful of decades since then, humanity has more than doubled that population number, and hardly anyone raises any alarm.

I watched a fair-minded (i.e. apolitical) video on the climate change crisis, which showed a perfect correlation between the population explosion since around 1920 and the problematic increase in the values of relevant climate variables.

This is not limited to correlation, as perfect sense concludes that the more people there are, the more land development occurs, the more resources are mined/farmed/etc., and the more pollution is generated (e.g. more drivers).

It is utterly terrible that our population explosion is causing dangerous climate instability. But that urgent mess is not the point of this post.

While the population tidal wave continues to rise due to the continuation of large families, the automation tidal wave is rising to an alarming degree.

Self-driving vehicles will eliminate millions of driver jobs in the coming decades. AI drivers never get tired/sick/moody/drunk/etc., are always learning to be better drivers through powerful perception and information tools that surpass human capability, and so on.

Analysis and even design jobs will disappear due to demonstrable AI superiority. Look at how brilliantly an AI designed the following sports car…

For those who proclaim the need for everyone to become programmers to solve this automation job elimination wave, we already know that a computer can learn all programming languages in an instant. How long will it be, before we can simply tell them to build a software programs in the same way that someone told it to build that car?

People need money to buy the means of survival and thrival.

People need to work a job to earn money.

As the population grows, and the jobs disappear, a powerful societal point of pain emerges, as the majority of people will be unable to survive.

Humanity needs to unfortunately promptly redefine itself.

I have much more to practically say on the matter, but refrain from expressing it here due to brevity and a busy situation.

In the interim, feel free to mentally chew on this truism, and share this brutally serious problem to raise the awareness that is obviously needed.

One thing to note is if we fail to address our negative impact upon our environment, then that will horribly compound our obsolete employment model.

Nobody can sensibly claim that we do not live in interesting times.