MangoCats

Replacing people is a good thing.

Yes, and no: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-47352/why-economists-got-free-trade-with-china-so-wrong

It would still require a revolution.

I would like to believe that we could have a gradual transition without the revolution being needed, but... present political developments make revolution seem more likely.

or just propped up with something like UBI.

That depends entirely on how much UBI is provided.

I envision a "simple" taxation system with UBI + flat tax. You adjust the flat tax high enough to get the government services you need (infrastructure like roads, education, police/military, and UBI), and you adjust the UBI up enough to keep the wealthy from running away with the show.

Marshall Brain envisioned an "open source" based property system that's not far off from UBI: https://marshallbrain.com/manna

Machine learning? It’s already had a huge effect, drug discovery alone is transformative.

Machine learning is just large automated optimization, something that was done for many decades before, but the hardware finally reached a power-point where the automated searches started out-performing more informed selective searches.

The same way that AlphaZero got better at chess than Deep Blue - it just steam-rollered the problem with raw power.

The cotton gin has been used as an argument for why slavery finally became unacceptable. Until then society "needed" slaves to do the work, but with the cotton gin and other automations the costs of slavery started becoming higher than the value.

Al Gore's family thought that the political tide was turning against it, so they gave up tobacco farming in the late 1980s - and focused on politics.

Shareholders only care about the value of their shares increasing. It's a productive arrangement, up to a point, but we've gotten too good at ignoring and externalizing the human, environmental, and long term costs in pursuit of ever increasing shareholder value.

CEOs are the figurehead, they are virtually bound by law to act sociopathically - in the interests of their shareholders over everyone else. Carl Icahn also has an interesting take on a particularly upsetting emergent property of our system of CEO selection: https://dealbreaker.com/2007/10/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so-many-idiots-running-shit

No big employer... there are plenty of smaller companies who are open to do whatever works.

Universal Base Income - it's either that or just kill all the un-necessary poor people.

we will be no closer to some kind of 8-hour workweek utopia.

If you haven't read this, it's short and worth the time. The short work week utopia is one of two possible outcomes imagined: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

We shouldn’t be using it to replace artists, writers, musicians, teachers, programmers, and actors.

That's an opinion - one I share in the vast majority of cases, but there's a lot of art work that AI really can do "good enough" for the purpose that we really should be freeing up the human artists to do the more creative work. Writers, if AI is turning out acceptable copy (which in my experience is: almost never so far, but hypothetically - eventually) why use human writers to do that? And so on down the line.

The problem is that capitalism and greedy CEOs are hyping the technology as the next big thing, looking for a big boost in their share price this quarter, not being realistic about how long it's really going to take to achieve the things they're hyping.

"Artificial Intelligence" has been 5-10 years off for 40 years. We have seen amazing progress in the past 5 years as compared to the previous 35, but it's likely to be 35 more before half the things that are being touted as "here today" are actually working at a positive value ROI. There are going to be more than a few more examples like the "smart grocery store" where you just put things in your basket and walk out and you get charged "appropriately" supposedly based on AI surveillance, but really mostly powered by low cost labor somewhere else on the planet.