A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Because they still need to earn money for housing, food, medicine, etc.
If we lived in a world where machine productivity was used to meet everyone's basic needs, they would be saying that. But we don't. So machines doing more jobs doesn't free us from work, it just makes finding work more difficult.
Every job lost at the expense of AI needs to be taxed and those taxes applied to UBI.
Agreed
There's two main reasons:
If the thing that takes the labour away from the workers is owned privately, it will not benefit the workers.
If we do not drastically change how the economy works, people not being able to work to exchange their labour for income means they starve and die
For that you'd need to get rid of the concept of "work for a living" so that instead economic productivity is taxed and paid out to all citizens as a universal basic income. Arguably that's a long overdue change, because less human labor needed due to automation should be a good thing, not threaten workers' livelihood. But (similar to Covid) that would also put a light on those whose work we as a society value and need to keep going and the current discrepancy of how little a lot of them are paid vs the societal uselessness of a lot of those with a lot of money.
At this time, governments and corporations do not value people. Citizens and workers. Instead of the government supporting citizens, they're now at War with citizens by taking the rights away. Corporations, don't want to pay us or treat us humanely. They are eager to replace us.
Nobody is going to pay us to do nothing.
US system is one of oligarchist and geopolitical supremacism. Under that system, there is no room for crumbs to trickle down to citizenry, and more free time, and easier survivability, would be crumbs that reduce your manufactured hatred towards your fellow man.
The principle of comparative advantage and market access to the most options is not evil. Championing labour supremacism may be a lesser evil than fascist oligarchist militarism of technology, but it's still a distortion that harms everyone who doesn't directly benefit from any follow through on the championing. Unions today cooperate with the oligarchy in order to make life shit for non union members, and their goal is primarily to protect membership jobs more than expanding membership.
Categorically dysfunctional corrupt politics when championing power supremacism of any group as a bandaid for oligarchist, militarist supremacism.
The only solution to achieving your headline is UBI, where whoever is profiting in society pays taxes to give people choice/freedom over their time, including pursuing richness and paying more taxes in the process. UBI is redistribution of power. Not so much wealth. https://naturalfinance.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-global-prosperity-manifesto.html
Im in
In your hypothetical... will we, whose job AI replaced, get paid still? If not, then fuck AI replacing jobs because I won't have the time you think I'll have to spend with family since I'll be frantically trying to find a job to pay the bills.
Because it turns out the capabilities are nowhere near what was promised, and the “AI” isn’t doing anyone’s jobs.
If the AI is doing all the jobs we don't need a large young workforce and thus there is no underpopulation crisis
Sounds like a great plan, but I don't understand how it would increase cash flow to the billionaires.
Because you'll only get the time to spend with them; not the means to feed and house them or yourself.
Yeah, but now you've been laid off because the AI "does your job" and food and housing aren't free.