I fully expect AI can and will be used to hurt the masses in those ways. But on the other hand the masses may very well be made substantially wealthier by AI cutting through all the arcane memorization and beurocratic bullshit that society has levied upon them to keep them down over the past 100yr.

Why do I need a $$$$ dentist to assess my X-rays. Why not a $$ hygienist assisted by AI and checked by the dentist in the odd cases? Now multiply that sort of labor reshuffling by every sector of the economy.

You mean "learning things?"

We're really trying to reframe knowledge and skill as a form of oppression now?

Amazing how things that are often largely rackets or intentional bureaucratic barriers can be framed as "learning" and people like you will go to bad for them.

It's not the learning that's the oppression. It's the going through the motions clerical bullshit that makes all sorts of value producing things not worth doing.

I want a garage with a taller than 9ft wall. But I can't have one because that requires engineered drawings that cost enough to be a non-starter because of the bullshit motions that must be gone through. So what do I do, I build a 9ft wall and I put trusses on top that give me more headroom. Everyone is worse off. Me, the concrete people, the engineer who didn't get my business, the enforcer bureaucrat who has less work to justify their job, the truss people who sell me cheaper trusses because I don't need a 2nd floor now.

You see how replacing the clerical labor the engineering firm would task with such a project with $20 of API calls would benefit literally everyone involved here?

AI is seemingly poised to make repetitive paper pushing administrative bullshit and access to clerical work outputs cheaper and more accessible. This benefits us all in the same way that cheaper access to computation benefitted wide swaths of the economy when computers became dominant or cheaper access to communications benefitted everyone when the internet became commonly used or way a reduction in energy prices is felt across the entire economy.

The only real "losers" here (assuming it doesn't happen lightening fast) are those who's only work output is such clerical tasks because instead of a force multiplier for them it's a replacement.

You seem to be on some kind of tilt about having to deal with local building codes about raising your garage ceiling, which is an entirely different thing. Many people are able to deal with that just fine. Maybe AI would make dealing with local bureaucracy easier, maybe it wouldn't? You're probably still going to need to fill out a form to raise your garage ceiling or whatever.

This comment reeks of "64k ought to be enough for anybody".

>local building codes

Because anything to do with land and building example of a highly bureaucratic and expensive process. The process doesn't care who writes the stuff as long as the numbers check out. I can't do it (well enough) and I can't justify the expense. I'm not asking for bespoke work, just cookie cutter stuff. So if the cost were to come down....

>Maybe AI would make dealing with local bureaucracy easier, maybe it wouldn't?

The bureaucracy isn't the hard part. They are like a shitty vending machine. They need the right amount of inputs for a given output and it needs to be of good quality, no wrinkled bills. The justifying the juice for the squeeze is the hard part. I literally cannot stamp drawings no matter how hard I learn and no engineer can stamp my drawings without essentially recomputing everything. Whatever situation one cares to look at there's always someone at a margin like this.

Think about it from the engineer's perspective. He's not some huge national firm that can afford bespoke software to tie his existing software together and make his employees lightening fast at what they do. He needs to pay someone to do all the "work" of plugging things in, choosing what sort of calculations to run, etc, etc. He can't bid me a price I can justify. Maybe we'll get to a point where an AI inbox assistant can reformat and shovel inputs to his team so that they can work faster, and therefore cheaper and scoop up all the potential work like mine.

Now replace the engineer with something else. Maybe you do tolerance studies for manufacturing. If you can make your stuff cheaper more people can afford to benefit from your stuff.

And so on and so on for every comparable situation (someone wants to do something, but can't justify the cost of the desk work they'd have to buy along the way) in the whole economy. There's a TON of potential upside. The cost of flooding the world with low quality written content, scam chatbots, AI porn and everything else seems low in comparison to me.

Those days are gone, never to return, and the rules are being rewritten to exclude the middle.

It may be true that AI is unpopular in the west more generally though, not just America.

But again, we pretty much acomplished all the major goals of evolution - now we're pretty much just weaponizing it for enjoyment, pleasure and entertainment to keep ourselves from being bored. As for the rest of us where it just seems like the natural continuation to tickle the curiosity on our brains as depressing, dystopian and heartbreaking as it sounds we are currently heading towards accomplishing the final innovation we will produce as a human race: create something superior to our biological lifeforms.

Maybe uploading ourselves into a super computer isn't as sci-fi as we thought since it seems living as a normal human will become extremely difficult.