The elite think they can use advanced computers and industrialization to automate a large number of jobs and Turd World semi-slave labor to replace the rest.
What they don’t seem to realize is that their workers with a 6th grade education (if that) and a tendency to violence cannot actually support the society that made them wealthy in the first place; they don’t want a white-picket-fence house or a peaceful neighborhood to live in because they’re content with overcrowded living and dodging shootouts on the way home from work. Nor can they be counted on to protect them or their property when the next war rolls around - imagine Russia invading and the elite having to rely on Central/South America mercenaries. And in the event of any large-scale disaster that destroys infrastructure and/or the advanced machinery, they won’t have the ability to rebuild them. Button pushers simply can’t repair equipment that took a team of MIT graduates years to even design.
I had an argument with several research post-docs regarding their utopian vision of what people will do when we get rid of all the jobs.
* Just because you find such work boring and demeaning doesn’t mean those with an average or below average IQ do. In fact, it gives them social status, purpose and interaction. Your biases are clouding your decision on what is best for these people.
* You imagine a paradise when many jobs are eliminated. Want a real life precursor? The inner cities already relying heavily on welfare with drugs, crime, broken families, despair. And by driving automation on purpose regardless of the human cost, you’re creating more of said crime.
* The idea that people will suddenly volunteer more is disproved by the same worldwide phenomena. It is the people who already have jobs who volunteer, the janitor who then works an afternoon picking up trash at the park. Instead, we have welfare recipients and able bodied people on social security with ADD unwilling to pick up trash where they live.
* You are assuming that shifting to AI to make decisions is unbiased. No, it will have the biases of the programmers - and those are currently people who programmed the decision making algorithms that denied a woman in Oregon cancer treatment and sent her info on assisted suicide, or HMOs that denied care due to cost but now the doctor will be even more limited by the all-powerful computer that puts little value on human life.
I don’t know if I actually got through any of their heads. They’d never even HEARD pro-human arguments like this. If I hadn’t been a female engineer talking about the future of STEM and technology, thus a novelty, they’d likely have ignored me.