The Human Reservation Plan
Bill doesn't want to be left behind by Zuckerberg so he decided to share his own thoughts on AI. Different from his previous shared ideas about how great it was. Now there is a bit more doom and gloom. Crime. Unemployment. Healthcare. Horrible things. What the world needs is a plan. Guess who has a plan ... It's the pope, and Bill and "the government".
Set aside some jobs for humans.
A human reservation. For the human to human interactions. So you don't get the bad news from the machine. That it's the machine that tells one human to tell another human the bad news is apparently softening the blow of the bad news.
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/08/13/2028222
Gates Warns Society Faces An AI-Pocalypse Unless We Get More Socialist
Bill Gates thinks that experts underestimate the potential havoc AI will wreak on society and says preparations to ease the transition are inadequate.
The Microsoft founder and former CEO is usually a cheerful proponent of AI tech, talking up its potential to transform healthcare, education, and business productivity.
Yet in a missive posted to his personal website, the billionaire philanthropist says the AI era is likely to be one of the most turbulent times in human history, and how we allow it to play out will determine whether the world becomes a fairer place or if the divide between rich and poor becomes greater than ever.
This kind of talk will sound dangerously close to socialism for many Americans. There are always winners and losers in a market-led economy, so why should things be any different with AI? Those wealthy enough to invest in it and control it will prosper, as others will find themselves on skid row.
But, Gates says, this time it will be different. Previous technology transitions happened over several generations and created new jobs where human cognition was required, whereas AI is starting to replace human cognition. The winners are likely to be a small group of people, and the losers will be everyone else.
It will not affect just one or two sectors, according to the AI fab club: AI will replace human roles in fields as diverse as law, customer services, medicine, software, and manufacturing. And it will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade or less, rather than taking a few generations.
Gates wrote:
When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
There will be some new jobs created, Gates says, but without the right policies in place there will be far fewer than today, and entry-level jobs are among those most likely to vanish (as we're already seeing in the tech industry).
Blue-collar jobs will also be affected, as AI-powered robots are advancing faster than people realize - much of the progress is happening in China. These may begin to compete with people on some physical tasks, such as in the construction and hospitality industries, within a few years.
Gates says there are several big risks from AI adoption, foremost of which is that many work roles are set to disappear forever. He notes that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment in the US hit 25 percent and remained in double digits for much of that decade, but ultimately recovered as demand, investment, and growth returned. He fails to mention, however, that it took a global war for that to happen.
The biggest shift comes when AI operates error-free operation, without humans prepping its work or checking its output. Gates says we need to think now about reducing job losses, or risk much of society ending up unemployed.
Another danger, Gates says, is that AI empowers people to do harm: AI-driven malware already lets low-skilled attackers launch cyberattacks, while generative AI makes fraud, disinformation, and deepfakes easier to produce.
The third big threat is that AI systems could stunt the mental development of children, and crowd out human relationships.
So how is society meant to avoid this apocalyptic vision and ensure AI becomes the force for good that Microsoft's progenitor believes it to be?
Gates says AI needs both a domestic and international framework. Nationally, that means bodies that can set priorities across government agencies to ensure every risk is accounted for. Yet even a nation with its own house in order remains exposed to cross-border risks, so an international body must be built in parallel.
If that sounds like wishful thinking, get in the queue. Gates notes it would require US-China cooperation, and under the current Washington administration, that's about as likely as pigs flying..
Beyond that, some jobs - social care for instance - should stay human. Gates also thinks the tax system will need rebalancing, as more people out of work means less income tax to fund government itself.
A starting point, he suggests, is taxing AI tokens and robots to reduce corporations' incentives to swap meatbags for machines. This could fund retraining and a stronger safety net, but would need careful targeting so it doesn't hinder beneficial uses of AI, like drug discovery and better education
Again, critics will likely dismiss this as socialism and point out that Microsoft was ruthless in pursuing profits under Gates' leadership.
In a final message to world leaders, Gates urges them to act now, "before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded."
This marks a shift for the Microsoft founder, who two years ago told people not to worry about AI, in particular energy use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, arguing AI would eventually solve the problems it creates.
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Related Stories
The future is for everyone and it will all just be great and awesome. No problems. That is our AI fueled future according to Zuckerberg.
On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto about personal AI, largely about the possibilities for the "personal superintelligence" systems Meta AI is building. The ideas in the post aren't totally new. A version of the essay ran in The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago, and he's talked about them on Meta earnings calls before. But this is probably the most detailed version he's shared.
What I'm wondering, I might have missed it, is if he wrote it himself or he had his AI write it for him.
https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/10/mark-zuckerberg-ai-power-01030904
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/10/mark-zuckerberg-superintelligent-ai-essay-meta
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/mark-zuckerbergs-ai-manifesto-is-exactly-why-people-dont-like-ai/
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/977623/mark-zuckerberg-ai-manifesto-dim-vision
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @12:07PM (9 children)
Apparently, after 23 years online for free, Manna has recently been taken down?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260725174355/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 [archive.org]
If you haven't read it yet, make the time - it's not very long and is very much on-point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) [wikipedia.org]
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @12:10PM (2 children)
Warning: this contains a sad new ending to the larger story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain [wikipedia.org]
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 28, @03:09PM (1 child)
From the arstechnica article:
Barry and Kashani expressed disappointment in the university’s lack of public response. “It’s been six days now,” Kashani said at the time to the school newspaper. “There hasn’t been any acknowledgment of mistakes that were made, systems that failed, no resignations, not even a call to celebrate Marshall’s achievements.”
I wonder if anyone ever took the blame...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @04:29PM
Around 2008 I worked with an MD who had research projects running at the local Uni, an ex-research assistant went sour grapes on him - the assistant claims that he, himself, mishandled PHI in violation of HIPAA and blamed the MD not for not training him (a PhD candidate), not for mis-training him or otherwise encouraging him to violate HIPAA, but instead blamed the MD for insufficient oversight of himself while he was violating HIPAA. The uni responded by shutting down all programs associated with the MD and cutting all ties with him. MD took them to court and proved the Uni mishandled the whole situation, but there were no effective damages to recover and no way to restart the programs it was just a "finding of fault" that cost the MD tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and weeks in court spread across months of stress about the injustice of the situation. MD said at the time that he enjoyed his root canal procedure (which came in the middle of the court proceedings) more.
Coincidentally, around this time the MD's company I was working for was led by a younger MD CEO, before they hired me to execute their software ambitions they already had an FDA consultant. Both the consultant and I advised the CEO of certain certainties of failure in their FDA submission strategies but the CEO pushed back with "your path takes too long and costs money we don't have, we just have to try it this way and hope it works" which, of course, it didn't, in two separate aspects both of which both of us advised the CEO he was on a course unlikely to succeed. By the 2nd round I was pretty much in Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka mode of "no, don't, stop..." but the other children in the room weren't asking "why doesn't he listen." After the predicted rejections were returned from the FDA, the company "found the money" to do it the way suggested in the first place, at higher cost and a year's delay from the advised path. A year or so after that, after expending significant time and effort pursuing a sales relationship with an overseas company I specifically advised them of being untrustworthy, unethical and having demonstrably illegally damaged a previous company I worked with through patent violations, when the company finally ran out of money in my "exit interview" the CEO expressed disappointment that I didn't advise them more vehamently, even though they repeatedly waved the org chart in my face with them at the top...
That whole university experience, in that company and the others I worked with there, left me disappointed in the Gen-whatever that was graduating there in the 2010 timeframe, their habits of avoiding things they don't want to deal with by "ghosting," and their utter lack of persoal accountability to themselves - acting as if, and apparently believing to their core, it's other people's responsibility when they make bad decisions for themselves.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday August 28, @04:27PM (5 children)
Oooh thanks for that, I remember reading it when it came out (wow, 20 years ago now!) but I could not remember the name or the URL.
Reading it 20 years later is an interesting experience I will give you that, not sure it aged well -- a bit too fanciful, a good dollop of reducto-ad-absurdum and a final choice (from my vantage point) of two oppressive dystopias, neither of which is that appealing if you take the time to think about it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @04:41PM (4 children)
I don't know - I feel like his writing is far from top tier (are we going to have sex?...) but most of the concepts are up there.
The "Australia Project" is presented very open-ended with exceptionally weak development of the end-game concepts. The timeframe of the original story was too short (they noted that it originally rolled out Manna 1.0 in 2010, a date he retracted in 2012 to leave it open ended. It looks to me like we're more on-track for a 2030 rollout instead.) Likewise, 40 years from Manna 1.0 through Altered Carbon style brain interfaces still seems a bit quick to me, but the whole Kurzweilian Singularity premise is that acceleration is accelerating exponentially, and I have certainly seen examples of those kinds of transitions in my lifetime.
Now, leaving the end-game concepts weakly developed is the classic "write your own ending" writers' device, and I see the prospect of being able to choose to live in a 1700s Jamestown reproduction with flawless medical care and the other problems solved, and then to vacation in zero-g orbital playgrounds when desired to have some obvious appeals and certainly be no more of an oppresive dystopia than actual 2026 life on Earth anywhere I know about. Having a "bad behavior immobilizer" price of entry certainly cuts down on the problems of police brutality, as long as the fascists don't get control of everyone's off-switches.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday August 28, @09:19PM (3 children)
Sure, I agree about the writing, the guy is no J.R.R Tolkien, and as you say there are inconsistencies in the realisticness but the story is readable and he gets his point across.
Actually my problem is not so much with the storytelling than with the concepts, I see so many holes in it that I don't know where to begin nor how to not end up writing a huge critique of the whole thing, but I'll try to keep it short.
*** WARNING: SPOILER ALERT BELOW ***
1. The whole "Manna" thing managing people with headsets. Sure I can believe that, I've already seen employees walking around supermarkets with headsets when stacking shelves, etc... no doubt they are being told to do stuff by a controller somewhere, most likely a human one for the moment, but LLMs are advancing enough that I can imagine them taking over to manage a store from a human.
But to jump from that to a neo-feudal society with a thin sliver of aristocracy at the top and the majority of the rest of the population being unemployed and imprisoned in big brown hovels guarded by robots is just unrealistic.
For one it completely ignores human nature, every single time in history that the wealth gap got too big, that society would collapse into fighting. From the Luddites to the Socialist/Bolshevik/other revolutions, there is no example in history where the majority of people quietly went into their imprisonment.
Even the Romans knew not to push the masses to that level because people who are desperately poor have nothing to lose, but everything to gain by overthrowing the current order.
To think that USA, a country pretty much founded on "freedom" and who to this day have more firearms per capita than anywhere else in the world will quietly be herded into what are effectively prison cells without even attempting to fight and destroy such a system is just not believable to me.
Secondly it actually ignores the market economy -- If the majority of the population is imprisoned in these hovels and given basic meals and an existence, who is going to buy all the products the robots make? Who will frequent all the manna-robot restaurants, supermarkets, and all the other services? The economy would cease to function because the vast majority of potential customers are not in the economy. Sure you can service the rich, but they are too few in number to support such a system indefinitely.
Thirdly the idea that humans would be unemployed by robots ignores that if so many humans are unemployed, they will become cheaper than robots, so there will always be jobs for them. Those humans are a resource, having them sitting idle and captive is a loss, the story even hints at that by pointing out the robots are happy for the humans to go to Australia as they would no longer be a burden to the system. We still this even now in the early days of AI -- everyone was talking how "AI will replace workers" until the actual cost of tokens started to bite, suddenly its cheaper to keep your workers than pay for the AI, markets tend to find balance between extremes.
Back to the story: So the humans sitting in these brown prisons are actually a drain on the economy, putting them to work, even for lower wages than robots would make sense because (a) it will give them something to do, (b) it will keep the economy functioning even if you to top them up with welfare payments and (c) they will actually contribute to the economy along with the robots.
I will also point out that "it will give them something to do" is critically important, having more than 50% of the population imprisoned, desperate to get out of the hell they are in and resenting those who put them in this predicament is not wise.
Because those elites, who are (like all aristocratic human groups) fighting amongst themselves for more power and wealth will be looking for any way to outwit their opponents and grab even more power. Based on the story it seems the societal structure is essentially of an aristocratic oligarchy with a "King" who presumably is placed there by the will of the strongest grouping of oligarchs (the democratic elections being a facade) .
That means oligarchs are always on the look out for extra power, sure they probably have their own robot armies as security, but they would all be roughly evenly matched. If I were an oligarch in such a world and I wanted to make a bid for taking over, I'd need a larger army than the rest -- and as luck would have it there is more than half the countries population imprisoned: hundreds of millions of destitute people, desperate to get out of the hell they are in and angry at those who put them there.
All I would need to do is promise them freedom, get them to sign up to join me, provide arms and training and I'd have an army large enough to take a swing at the "king". Win or lose, that society would not survive the conflict that ensued.
To cut a long story short, the neo-feudal society envisioned in the story I feel has little chance of reaching the end state that was described without collapsing, but even if by some miracle they manage to herd most of the USA population (we are talking hundreds of millions of people here) into prisons, I doubt the society will stay in that steady state very long, possibly not even a single generation. One ambitious oligarch (or a peoples resistance organisation) with a source of weapons would make a pigs breakfast of the whole thing in short order.
(I did not even get into the whole black market economy and parallel societal structures, which would also happen long before the mass imprisonment)
---- [ Continued on next post in a few minutes, despite my shortening attempts I still hit comment limit] ----
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday August 28, @09:28PM
Which brings me to the Australia project, on paper it sounds like a utopia, everything is free, you can have and do whatever you want. bliss and pleasure and joy forever...
However to be in this utopia you have to agree to a set of terms, including:
1. completely foregoing any kind of privacy and anonymity
2. Having a robot inserted between your brain and your body
Now this robot can record everything from your eyes/ears/sensory organs, and it can also take control of your body. It can disconnect your retinas from your brain and inject images instead, it can disconnect your ears and inject sound into your brain. It can speak on your behalf using your voice, and move your body. It is effectively your own personal spy and policeman in one, built into your body, that can never be turned off, and can disconnect you and take over your body if the system decides needs must.
That to me is terrifying, it is possible for you to be a prisoner in your own body. How can you even know if the other person you are talking to is really that person, or if their body has been taken over via the spinal robot?
I mean the two girls who came to the brown hovel to talk about the Australia project, their brains may have been disconnected and the robot was doing all the talking, trying to convince more people to have spinal-robots inserted and their bodies taken control of. Perhaps the whole story of the guys father buying shares in the company to give his son and partner an "escape route" from their current predicament may even be a lie in itself they tell everyone. Just because the Australia project bills itself as some glorious human emancipation society doesn't mean it is true. Once the spinal robot is inserted you can never be 100% sure that you are talking to the original person the body belonged to.
Then the whole "network vulnerability" of the system is glossed over in the story with "magic technology and referees", like somehow they have made the perfect bug-free software system that can never be hacked and your body taken control of unwillingly.
And of course the idea that some nefarious person/group would not abuse this excellent opportunity to turn 2+ billion people into human robots that would obey their every whim is not even mentioned, as if the human condition has vanished completely (a large oversight if you consider that in the story the Neo-feudal USA is full just those kind of people "at the top", so they are obviously out there).
So to me the Australia project is a far worse prison than the brown cubes. As I mentioned earlier, in such a dismal state as the brown cube world there is always hope for resistance, for people to organise to overthrow the oppressors, either by themselves or with sympathetic (if self serving) oligarchs. They still own and control their own bodies and they can trust their senses are not lying to them.
The Australia project however makes that impossible. Because of the spinal robot, people no longer own their own bodies. It is impossible for people to ever get together to discuss things, to complain about the system, or consider overthrowing it or just trying to reform the system because they have objections. Everything is recorded, everything is logged, and if you violate the rules they can disconnect your brain from your body.
On the flip side, the robot controls your vision and sensory organs. When you wake up and you "see" what is in front of you, how do you know you are really seeing it and the robot is not projecting images directly to your brain? How do you know the people you are talking to are really there? You end up not being able to trust any of your senses. Dissent, let alone revolution, becomes impossible. It is like some horrific mix of the Matrix and 1984, but on another level. I think I'd go stark-raving mad if I was put in such a position.
I noticed that they don't mention the spinal-robot when they got the characters to sign up to their terms, you only find that out after they have shipped you to Australia , you've done the induction and now you are near the end-stages when they release you into the system. It is never mentioned what might happen if you refuse the spinal robot, the general gist of it is that you have no say about your body or what they do to it at this point.
I wonder how many people would have agreed to their terms if the first thing they mentioned was the spinal robot.
I can also make a point about the laws of physics making "free" energy impossible, nothing is free - even the wind turbines have a cost, by extracting energy from the wind they change the local climate, and they are not energy dense, having enough of them to support such an advanced technological society just seems like wishful thinking.
Which is another point, both of these societies are extremely complex and energy hungry, which makes them extremely fragile. I haven't even gone into the fact that in the story there are apparently only two countries on earth, the USA and Australia, it is as if the rest of the world does not exist, and people can't leave the oppressive brown cubes to live elsewhere. Likewise there is no war or geopolitics, no happy middle between these two extremes presented.
I mean I can suspend belief for a good fantasy story, but this story has too many holes for me to suspend belief, especially as its not supposed to be a fantasy as much as a warning about a real future world.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30, @03:54AM
>But to jump from that to a neo-feudal society with a thin sliver of aristocracy at the top and the majority of the rest of the population being unemployed and imprisoned in big brown hovels guarded by robots is just unrealistic.
Is it? I thought he traced that development rather thoroughly: information sharing between employers, you're either compliant and above average nose-to-the-grindstone or you're unemployed - everywhere. The hovels were for the unemployed, who became the vast majority of the population after the physical robots started making and maintaining themselves...
Given the under-employment of Gen-whatever they call its graduated after 2000, even without significant new robot replacement, the whole self-sustaining robot aspect is the real lynchpin that pivots us from our current boiled frogs state into a full blown human reservation. Back in the 1970s it was Richard Pryor commenting on Logan's Run "they ain't got no black people in their future, they're not gonna have any black people - that's the plan." This go around 50 years later, it's really the poor people, black was just a shorthand for poor 50 years ago, it's really the poor who you don't see in Star Trek visions of the future.
> every single time in history that the wealth gap got too big, that society would collapse into fighting.
Technology - not just Death Stars, but all forms of "government" (read: wealthy) controlled technological terror keeps the rabble in-line, coupled with all kinds of modern opiates for the masses, including the internet "venting chamber" where otherwise subversive radicals can go to blow off steam (and finger themselves for "intervention") instead of actually going on revolutionary violence sprees against their oppressors.
> USA, a country pretty much founded on "freedom" and who to this day have more firearms per capita than anywhere else in the world will quietly be herded into what are effectively prison cells without even attempting to fight and destroy such a system is just not believable to me.
Ever see a SWAT raid? An ICE arrest? Citizen wielded AR-15s are no match for a coordinated police response. How big do you think a citizen militia can get without government blessing? Waco was less than 100 counting women and children.
>there is no example in history where the majority of people quietly went into their imprisonment.
6 million Jews shipped off to concentration camps comes to mind - Germany only had 500,000 Jews before the war started - they "acquired" 3.3 million more when they took over Poland. Sure seems like they swept up the majority under their sphere of influence.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30, @04:20AM
> If the majority of the population is imprisoned in these hovels and given basic meals and an existence, who is going to buy all the products the robots make?
The ultra wealthy are gonna have some super-cool yachts, island complexes, space ships, etc.
Just the other day I sat down and asked an LLM about creation of a new framework like Qt, the LLM told me it would take 35 developer years of effort, etc. etc. etc. then proceeded to deliver the first 80% of the job that afternoon. That's just an informational thought experiment example, not using "real" resources like refined metals, fibers, fuels, etc. The ultra wealthy can keep their robot fleets occupied making buildings, vehicles, realistic sex slaves - of course when pesky "world opinion" isn't annoyingly weighing in anymore real sex slavery will be more openly practiced in "private places."
Nobody has to buy products to "make money" - money isn't real, resources are real. Once the economy is imploded, it will all be about resource control, who owns what and what they're willing to trade it for. If the Oligarchs can avoid too much open warfare on each other, once they've got self-servicing self-replicating obedient robot armies they won't need the poor anymore - they'll have the robots to do what the poor used to do for them.
> the manna-robot restaurants, supermarkets, and all the other services?
Those services become un-necessary when the population is all retired into end of life care institutions, at age birth. My mother and uncle checked into one of those not far from here last year, as they turned 77 and 79. It's a nice place, and they're free to leave anytime they like, but it's not a big stretch to picture campuses like theirs where people aren't allowed out, and in practice the majority of residents don't often leave due to health issues associated with age. The campus provides housing, recreation, food - mostly food, the whole damn place revolves around food actually - when you buy in you pre-pay for your meals in-perpetuity. It's not bad food, actually really fancy stuff every night if that's what you want. And it's not a stretch at all to picture robots providing the necessary services instead of University students working for tuition vouchers.
> if so many humans are unemployed, they will become cheaper than robots
That is an interesting question: it's not about money, it's about resources. Are horses cheaper than cars? Not even a question of capabilities, horses just use more resources than cars, so we have a lot of cars and very few horses these days.
> the humans sitting in these brown prisons are actually a drain on the economy
That's the 'murican way. Put 'em in prison, pay $100K+ per year to keep 'em locked up. We can afford it.
> putting them to work, even for lower wages than robots would make sense
This is the US we're talking about - saying something makes sense is a good argument for why it's unlikely to happen.
> the actual cost of tokens started to bite
I suspect tokens are going to follow the price-curve of a byte of RAM from 1965 through 2024...
> having more than 50% of the population imprisoned, desperate to get out of the hell they are in
The story is pretty solid about this, the brown boxes aren't unheated concentration camp barracks with inadequate food and brutal forced labor. They boil the frogs, not making them too uncomfortable, otherwise they will try to jump out of the pot. Kind of implied in the story is that eventually, when they've rounded up all the poor they want to round up, when the people outside have sufficiently cut ties with the people inside, there will likely come an "unfortunate incident" day when the resources expended on keeping the camp inhabitants happy and docile can be re-purposed...
To be continued... maybe.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28, @12:32PM (8 children)
*sigh* the world's oldest cliche..
Eh, whatever, I guess billionaires are starting to worry about how to protect their fortunes, eh?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @01:11PM (7 children)
Money is only power when there are people you can push around with it. Billionaires in isolation have to scrub their own toilets.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28, @07:13PM (3 children)
I'd like to introduce you to reality, where UBI is nowhere despite every test of it showing unalloyed benefit and success .
Capitalists conspire to keep unemployement up, so that unreasonable offers must be accepted.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 29, @02:33AM
I'd like to introduce you to reality, where UBI is everywhere, just administered by sadistic post-Kafka bureaucratic tools.
It's the epitome of malicious compliance, those who hate "money for nothing" secretly acknowledge its necessity but do everything in their power to torture recipients.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @07:18PM
I see we're ignoring real world tests when you speak of "every test". For example, the US has numerous large scale, long term (multi-decade) programs that share many aspects of UBI. For example, US Social Security and Medicare: universal, basic, and near analogues to revenue. They also threaten the future of the US with spending greater than revenue and a large slice of the political spectrum strictly interested in short-term prolonging of the problem than in a fix: raising taxes rather than cutting benefits. In addition, the movement of wealth just creates problems: such as wealth transfer from a group that needs it, young adults to a group that doesn't, the elderly.
To be blunt, small scale UBI experiments run for short periods of time and cover a few people. US Social Security and Medicare have run for many decades and cover the entire US - over three hundred million people. They show the real problems with UBI: long term threats to a country's future, create large scale dependency and conflict of interest (such as incentivizing people to take more rather than fix fiscal problems with the benefits program), don't actually solve the problems they are allegedly meant to address (bonus points for the stolen concept fallacy of needs-based justifications for a non-needs-based program), are Ponzi schemes which require infinite population growth to succeed, promise breaking long after after the promise makers have disappeared, and of course, generate an ideological complex which has no interest in controlling any of these problems.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Monday August 31, @12:08PM
There's a massive elephant in the room regarding UBI here in the UK and it has been evident for nearly 30 years.
Many jobs pay so poorly, and working hours are so few, that many people need State Benefits ("welfare" in American) just to be able to go to work. And in the last 10-15 years, things have got so bad that working people often have to rely on food banks because things like rent and other essentials keep getting more and more expensive while pay does not keep pace. On top of that there was the COVID pandemic which adversely affected the long-term health of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
The benefits are really, really difficult to claim. The system is humiliating and exhausting. It's designed to put people off. Even people with permanent disabilities keep having to reapply every few months. This is apparently to "encourage people back to work" (many are already working as hard as they can) or in case they have "recovered" from their permanent disabilities.
You won't be shocked to learn that the current system was designed by right-thinking, upstanding, common-sense Conservatives, all with plenty of money and good incomes...
UBI would go a long way to making life so much better for millions, including business owners. However, they refuse to see the bigger picture.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 29, @02:25AM (2 children)
Funny thing, I was about to suggest "reserving" that job for Bill Gates.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29, @04:06AM (1 child)
Which sort of leads to the first thought I had when reading tfa:
I know what Bill is good at--if I want advice on starting out rich and building a monopoly I'll surely go to him...
Why would I expect Bill to understand anything about technology & society?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Gaaark on Sunday August 30, @04:32PM
He doesn't: in his one book, he says that the internet is just a fad. That is why Windows on the internet is not safe: security was built in ad-hoc as needed, not from the get-go.
He is a dumb feck who just knows how to do business: screw everyone who isn't me.
My guess is that Micro-dalek is falling behind in AI, so he wants government control of it til they can catch up... then, fuck everyone. Exterminate!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Friday August 28, @04:38PM (8 children)
What I find most interesting about these pieces, both Gates and Zuckerberg and other similar people, is how fast they change. They do not age well. It was just years ago, or in some case still, that if you didn't buy into AI Utopia you where some kind of luddite and everything was going to be awesome. We would all get more time and money to do things we liked. AI would do all the boring things. Now it's a lot more doom and gloom. We are not far from being AI serfs. In some regard I think Gates here have gone the furthest of his ilk. It's almost Matrix like and how we will need human reservations free from the benevolent and guiding hand of friend AI. How the human to human interaction have to be preserved from the AI overlords, or at least that we'll all have to play pretend. I would assume that this will in large be dependent on wealth, like all things. Richy Rich or Richy Bill will have human servants. He will get the bad news from human doctors. No robot will take care of him in his aging fragility. Other more normal, non billionaires, will have to take the command straight from the prompt of the robo-overlords.
It's almost as if they realize that they created a monster and now they want to be all prophetic about predicting the outcome. When it's "to late". They did not like the utopia they helped usher in once it got here.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bussdriver on Friday August 28, @05:12PM
As much as a sociopath Bill is, he does have children and grandchildren which will continue his legacy on in a more human, personal form than his organizational wealth will. He purposely did not give them easy wealth and they have to make their fortunes on their own. At least he didn't buy into creating a royal class of people with his lineage; he did pick up some decency from his father despite everything.
His descendants will have to live with the monsters he helped create.
Now that evil mother Zucker, who will want his offspring to be the rulers of the Nerd Reich will Zuck us all. Well, not evil really, he's a complete sociopath and amoral. The stuff he does has nothing to do with being anti-social or promoting anti-social behavior with intent, it's just amoral behavior whose consequences are often anti-social. So, he is unintentionally quite evil and I don't think he'd even give lip service to trying to sound human if it were not in his own best interests to get people to think he's human. His middle age insecurity with the macho man fighting BS is the most humanizing thing he's ever done, including somehow having a children, which I wonder if they are his... his wife might also be some alien human hybrid creation as well...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday August 28, @05:57PM (6 children)
I think you are buying into "luddite" as an insult, when in fact the OG Luddite Movement were people practicing what at the time was considered a skilled trade who were completely correct about the impact of the machines in question on their livelihoods and what management was going to do to them once the machines were installed and running. The government of course didn't give the slightest bit of a damn about their complaints, so they engaged in vigilante property damage to try to protect themselves from poverty.
So under the current circumstances, white collar workers banding together to burn down data centers to protect their jobs wouldn't be an unexpected response.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday August 28, @06:31PM (3 children)
Without taking the time to google it, I believe you're correct. The original Luddites were weavers who faced the prospect of unemployment due to automated looms. Some sought, and successfully obtained a share of the increased profits from automated loom owners. They only broke the looms of those who wouldn't agree.
Until now, technology's impact on employment has been transient. We do just fine without a permanent class of enfranchised loom guild members obtaining a cut of the profits from every yard of fabric. Setting up that kind of system would have been counter-productive. The descendants of Luddites are now doing jobs they never imagined.
Either it really is "different this time" and new jobs won't be created by the introduction of AI, or AI and other technologies will provide the platform upon which activities currently not imagined take place. Regardless, the transient impact is real and needs to be managed fairly.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @07:09PM (1 child)
> We do just fine without a permanent class of enfranchised loom guild members obtaining a cut of the profits from every yard of fabric.
Do we? When federal taxes (and tax breaks) feed $760 Billion annually to the fossil fuel industry, that's $2200 per capita handed out not only to the fossil fuel Oligarchs, but also reducing the cost of gasoline, electricity and everything else that's melting the ice caps out there. $150B per year direct to food, $440 per capita making your rice, milk, cheese, fruits and meats cheaper at the source - lately our local grocery chains have started greedflation gouging but people are still free to shop at the more competitive stores, if they have the fossil fuel burining transport to do so. $3.5T annual spend on social safety net programs (yes, we "earned" that money through FICA taxes our whole lives, but, the tax-spend is still the lifeblood of the program) - that's over $10K per head on average, many get nothing, but those designated "in need" get a lot more than $10K annually. Put it all together against "The 2026 Federal Poverty Level (FPL) for a household of 4 is $33,000 annually." and the U.S. is already tax-spending more than that on average.
Make sure the loom owners start paying their fair share of taxes or else the whole house of cards collapses.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28, @07:17PM
"But... but... we want more money!" -- the owners
(Score: 4, Informative) by Unixnut on Friday August 28, @11:11PM
Yes and no, it wasn't just about the profits. For a long time weavers and spinners and similar "fabric industry" people were effectively self-employed, so called "cottage industry". They owned their tools, they worked from home, they worked the hours they wanted at the pace they liked.
However when the mechanical cotton spinning and weaving machines came into being, they were too expensive for a single self-employed person to buy, so "investors" with large amounts of money (either their own or the ability to borrow cheaply) would buy the machines and build the water/steam powered mill factories to install the machines, and they would then hire people and pay them fixed wages to work fixed hours.
This was the beginning of the "employee", up until then the concept did not really exist. Either you were a tenant farmer, so you worked according to natures schedule and kicked up some percentage of your harvest to the landlord, or you owned you own cottage industry business, everything from weaving to blacksmithing to tavern owners who lived in the taverns with their family.
You did have labourers and workmen, but they were paid by the day. You had to negotiate their wages each time, and they had the right to refuse the work if they did not want to do it.
The concept of an "employee" was someone who had to work fixed hours for fixed wages, day in and day out. Unscrupulous mill owners realised that if they increased the speed the machines run at, they would create more money as the wages were fixed but they produced more product per unit time (i.e. they "improved employee productivity"). Problem is running the machines faster made them more dangerous, these were big machines with fast moving metal parts and no real protection from the clockwork mechanisms they used. People would lose fingers and limbs all the time, children would be hired to oil the machines from underneath while they were still running (because shutting them down meant lost production), and every once in a while a child would get caught in the machinery and end up either dead or horrifically crippled, at which point if their families could not sustain them they would end up begging on the street or in the poorhouse.
The fixed hours worked meant that people could not decide how much and when they worked, plus they had to live near the mill to "commute" by foot. They had to leave the countryside and live close to the mill, resulting in horrifically bad slum housing near the mills, full of all kinds of diseases and completely unhygienic environment.
Going from their cottage industry work, many were upset with this change and they started rioting, smashing up machines etc... but it was mostly disorganised and any half-decent organised policing action put it down easily.
The problem came after mechanisation took the low level jobs, when machines started replacing the master craftsmen. The master weavers/spinners were masters not just because they were good at their jobs, but because they had experience and also they had many apprentices. They knew how to organise and manage people -- they were effectively the middle managers of their day, and were correspondingly well paid.
When they started losing their jobs, they were offered the same employment conditions and wages as the other employees, which they protested against. They also knew how to organise people, and they turned the previous riots by the lower skilled ex-workers into proper organised vigilanties who would go around destroying machines of owners who did not pay good wages or who had poor working conditions. To avoid any one of the organisers being singled out for retribution and eventual execution at the hands of the state, a mythical "General Ludd" came into being, his followers being known as "Luddites", they would attack and destroy machines in "the name of General Ludd", and their statements and proclamations would be signed by the same General Ludd. That way they could work through a pseudonym and the state had no one physical leader to arrest and make an example of.
Some mill owners, like Titus Salt [wikipedia.org] decided treating employees like dirt was a bad idea, so he actually built them a proper town next to his mill [wikipedia.org], called "Saltaire" it had a school, hospital, good quality clean (but modest) housing and he generally treated his employees well. Needless to say such owners did not have many problems with Luddites.
Other mill owners, when confronted with the Luddites, went the other way. Instead of improving working conditions or paying higher wages they invested in armour for their mills and armed guards to shoot any attacking Luddites. This caused an escalation into proper firefights, entire mills being set on fire and even targeted assassinations of such mill owners.
The government, fearing the escalating violence decided to intervene... on the side of the mill owners. They sent in the army to put down the rebellion, and after much death and destruction the Luddites were crushed.
However the Luddites set the stage for the later development of things like minimum wage, health and safety and labour protection laws to prevent exploitation of workers, if for no other reason than it was bad for long-term business to have to keep killing your rebelling workforce while they do their best to destroy your capital investment.
In some ways the Luddites were the first to fight for employee/labour rights, using the only tools at their disposal at the time. The fact they are remembered as a bunch of "backward peasants who opposed technology only to fail to stem the march of progress" says more about which side is currently writing our history books than anything else.
A decent read about the Luddites can be found here if interested: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Luddites/ [historic-uk.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Friday August 28, @07:40PM (1 child)
I would not say I'm buying into it. But for most people that use the term or how the term is used today it's mostly as a description of someone being anti-technology. That is what it has evolved to. The actual Luddites? Nobody normal remembers, or cares about, them but in name.
Considering how much people are up in arms against the datacenters and their impact on local areas I'm surprised some have not been burned to the ground yet. I guess we sort of evolved a bit away from burning things down. But it's still there. The urge. When words and protests fail there is always violence. It's always an option.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @07:52PM
I've been a "luddite" vs the bleeding edge surfers for 40 years, I prefer my tech proven useful before I spend large quantities of time and money on "trying it out."
I didn't dive into Windows 95 until 1997 - though I did give an intern a summer project in it in 1996 as an investigative step.
I didn't get a cell phone until 1999, and then only as insurance against being stranded in the middle of the everglades by our $1800 beater car we drove everywhere, or more likely our brand new truck - though neither ever happened, the ability to call in for a bail-out and have a known rescuer instead of whoever happened to stop was reassuring.
I didn't consider AI/LLM useful until just about exactly a year ago - and even then they were more promise than value, another 4 months proved them to be improving into truly useful territory as they appeared to be doing back in August. Before that, I gave them a few test chats for programming back around March 2025 and considered them still in not-quite useful toy territory. Today, I looked back at an old-tool chain I last setup in 2020 - took me a solid week to get it smoothed out and useful. This week it became apparent that I'm going to be called upon to resurrect that toolchain, and a cursory glance into the LLM assisted world of such things makes me confident that I should be able to set the whole thing up in a Docker container (where I went bare metal in 2020), and even with the added complications of hooking Docker into the X display system I should have the toolchain up in a single work day, maybe half a day.
Whenever considering a new tech / toy, ask yourself: will this be serving me, or am I going to be serving it, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) [wikipedia.org] ?
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]