> You are yet to show how this benefits humanity in a way that outweighs harm to humans who lose their jobs
I think it's pretty obvious if you think beyond trying to protect the status quo. The benefit is simply that machines do work so humans don't have to. It's no more complicated than that. It's what we humans have always strived to do: to make our lives easier. It's why an electric screwdriver exists.
The fact that making our lives easier has become a problem is the actual problem. We should address that problem instead of trying to protect it.
> The benefit is simply that machines do work so humans don't have to.
Why is it a benefit? Because not having to work the ultimate ideal? Why would that be the case?
To me it seems like it’s only an ideal for those who wield the robots who do the work and profit from that, not to people who wouldn’t be able to do compensated work if they wanted to. (Ultimately, it’s a means of control: if there are no jobs, the people in power get to decide how to distribute sustenance to jobless population. Rest assured, that population will not dare to bite the hand that feeds them.)
The ideal is to be able to choose to do work you enjoy doing, feel pride in it, get fairly compensated for it. To not be able to do this seems like a strongly negative outcome.
> making our lives easier has become a problem
Is “easier life” the ultimate ideal? Why? There’s many other, more compelling things it could be (e.g., “fulfilled”, “happy”, “meaningful”, “satisfying”) and many of them are not exactly aligned with “easy”.
Even if easier life was your ideal, the precedent has been that automation does not lead to that—we are doing more work (and more challenging, a.k.a. the opposite of “easy”, work) instead[0]. As jobs go away, whoever is still lucky to have one gets getting paid less to do more work (that’s just market forces at work), while a small minority profits and benefits from more accumulated power. Is that what you want to happen? If yes, we don’t have anything to discuss further. If not, you have the power to be part of the change.
> Is that what you want to happen? If yes, we don’t have anything to discuss further. If not, you have the power to be part of the change.
I think I've been pretty consistent that I think the change necessary is a social/political one, not a tech one. Whether or not we're capable of this change is another question.
I have not seen a description of what this “target reality” should even look like. It sounds like either you have not thought about what it would be, or you did but you would rather keep it to yourself.
It is not even a question that it would be strongly unethical (like evil addictive social media/crypto scams/online casino times a thousand level of unethical) to proceed on working on job-replacing robots without considering what a tenable no-job reality would like like, or after deciding it is probably not achievable.
I think it's pretty obvious if you think beyond trying to protect the status quo. The benefit is simply that machines do work so humans don't have to. It's no more complicated than that. It's what we humans have always strived to do: to make our lives easier. It's why an electric screwdriver exists.
The fact that making our lives easier has become a problem is the actual problem. We should address that problem instead of trying to protect it.