My read, but the effective policies are infeasible, and the feasible policies are largely business as usual. Pretty much precisely as expected, honestly. I struggle to see how anything like this is going to be implemented without business as usual changing in ways that the current system is extremely resistant to.

I thought this was a good read with good data analysis, but at the end of the day none of this matters if the political and democratic systems collapse. If there is broad displacement by AI, I find it really difficult to believe folks will sit down and have a rational discussion about pros and cons of various policies, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will happen. I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working class was successfully channeled into a cult around a grifter and huckster whose vast majority of policies are most detrimental to his biggest supporters.

Though AGI isn’t here yet (and in my opinion will only be marginally useful until we have physical AGI), we need to speedrun the painful bits so we can get to the other side in one generation. We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.

I think that there are a lot of people who would be unwilling to sacrifice their life.

Looking back at the beginning of the 1900s and now there are a lot of meta level parallels. Too much change is happening too quickly for societies to realistically adapt. This leaves a lot of room for greedy agents to gather other power seeking agents to further destabilize the situation for their own gain. The outcome of things like this is almost always war. Problem is once war starts it tends to spiral out of control and the body counts increase rapidly.

We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.

Who is "We" here?

I'll take a guess: Gen Z, and Gen A.

Gen Z because they went through covid during college, and now this AI boom that's completely wreaked the entry level job market.

Gen A is looking increasingly grim, unfortunately. If any of you know any school teachers, you'd know how disheartening it is to try and teach someone that has a homework and entertainment machine in their pocket at all times.

Millenials went through everything Gen Z has and more ('08), but there was at least a few years of relative normalcy growing up. I don't know what's next, but I'm not very excited about it.

/rant

As always, named "generations" are completely arbitrary and meaningless. They're made up by marketers to sell products.

A generation is a time that people were born between and useful because it embodies much of the cultural context that people share.

No, it doesn't. The baby boomers represented an actual demographic change, that's why they're tracked by the Census Bureau. Everything since then is marketing and astrology.

you are just nitpicking.

People get used to understand what generation 'name' they got from society, thinktanks and co and its not that hard to know what the younger generations are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation#List_of_social_gene...

Astrology is just garbage.

It's the same, you're just substituting years for months.

The difference is that named generations don't claim that any differences are due to supernatural influence. Instead they are arguing that the differing circumstances in which people grow up and live influences their experiences and how they see the world. That is a MUCH more defensible position.

Named generations are a marketing tool, it’s a concept as garbage as astrology

BS. While I agree the cutoffs are arbitrary, marking a cohort by, say, "people who graduated highschool before the advent of smart phones" or "people who went through childhood in the early years of social media" are valid groupings.

As a Gen Xer my childhood was soooo different from what kids today experience. And literally every single Gen Xer I know is glad and feels relief (sometimes mixed in with remorse) that our childhood was before the consumer Internet took off.

If you want these cohorts to have statistical significance you have to add more details, such as the geographic location, language, etc. But you can create cohorts with pretty much anything, in itself that doesn’t validate the concept of generations as pitched by marketing agencies

Correct. It is another way to divide people again, just like people who are pro-AI vs anti-AI.

Do not fall for it.

Just because something is arbitrary doesn't mean it is meaningless or useless. In this context named generations are useful because they allow us to discuss the experiences of people born at different times. Certainly there are alternatives like going back to dividing things up by decades ("80s kid", "child of the 90s", etc.); however, that doesn't make named generations useless.

No it doesn't. I have little in common with a Japanese rice farmer born in the same year.

The named generations are generally used in the context of specifically American culture or at least English speaking culture. They were never intended to say you have generational similarity to someone in a completely different culture.

So now it only refers to Americans? The arbitrary goal post shifting continues.

"need to"? why?

I'd rather read an analysis from the World's Socialist Website than from the perpetrators.

What are your concrete plans now for the 30,000 Oracle employees that have been fired because Larry got overly ambitious with AI?

Funny how Hyperscalers will write endlessly about this outcome but have no plan for what happens if LLMs turn out to be a bubble and the economy they're propping up goes into recession

What were your concrete plans then for the thousands of Oracle employees who were fired in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2017, and 2022 before they got ambitious with AI? Mass layoffs at Oracle are nothing new, they've never hesitated to make huge cuts.

Considering that socialism has been an abject failure every time it's been tried at scale, I fail to see any analysis from the World's Socialist Website could be useful.

Socialism has been hugely successful. Just look at Western Europe and the Nordic countries. Socialism has only been an abject failure if you swallow the conservative talking point that "socialism" is always equivalent to Stalinism/Maoism.

The Nordic countries abandoned their failed attempt at socialism decades ago.

I'm sorry but that's simply not true. They still have socialized medicine, generous social safety nets, significant worker protections, etc.

Embodied robots is the most significant threat imo. Capital can be taxed but for now we have few general policy frameworks for the "who gets to walk and drive on the street" question

Yet in the short term, significant transformations have often also produced lower wages for many, hollowed out regional economies, and deepened inequality.

"Short term" being rather loosely used? Most industrial regions have never recovered. Look at Gary Indiana, Detroit and surrounding towns, Toledo, other regions that were dependant on manufacturing or mining. Most have been stagnating for decades; few have found a path back to a thriving economy.

Those places aren’t isolated though. Many of their residents (and especially their children) have left and found opportunities in other parts of the country.

Economists tend to prefer policies that help people, not places. Gary, Indiana just doesn’t have any geographical advantages that make it competitive.

I think, if anything, the mistake was to allow people in those places to believe there would be an eventual turnaround by trying to prop up uncompetitive manufacturing industries.

Gary, Indiana.

Large parts of Northern England.

Large parts of Scotland.

Walloonia in Belgium.

Northern France.

There are LOTS of regions where the people living there have never recovered after deindustrialization. We cannot expect millions of people to just uproot, it's not realistic.

What about socializing the means of production???