At least hundreds of millions, if not billions, can't afford airtight walls and a ceiling. Their homes are made of sheet metal and other scraps. They can buy a few panels for the family which rest on dirt to power their phones.
If there is any technological progress, people in 3000 will be so much wealthier than we are today that fixing any problems arising from climate change will be trivially easy for them.
That is, if there are any people in 3000. Nuclear war is still the number one problem. AI is a candidate for number two right now; the next decade should clarify things.
"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.
Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.
Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.
Speak for yourself. I can count the times I flied in my whole life on one hand, and I have never flied domestically. It's not some unachievable ideal, and majority != everyone.
It's a funny business. I'm a bit skeptical how much of a problem it will be but am up for fixing things. But me not flying will make no difference. The kind of thing that could is a global carbon tax but hardly anyone seems up for that.
Even worse, without use for them, they’re a liability. Having a boatload of now useless probably angry is a dangerous scenario. Peasant rebellion are rare, but too happen, particularly when starvation is on the table.
So the play will be to boil the frog so to say. Find a way to make it acceptable to get rid of these “extra” people without too much noise. Consider the current rhetoric around homeless people.
If everything that a human can do, a robot can do better and cheaper, then humans are completely shut out of the production function. Humans have a minimum level of consumption that they need to stay alive whether or not they earn a wage; robots do not.
Since most humans live off wages which they get from work, they are then shut out of life. The only humans left alive are those who fund their consumption from capital rents.
If humans who don't own robots are not producing and therefore not earning, then they're also not buying. Who are the robot owners selling their products to?
See: "build me a bigger yacht", building moon bases, researching immortality medicine, and building higher walls and better killbots to manage any peasant attacks
Why would other robot owners need to buy anything? They can just get their AIs to figure out how to make the things they're buying so they can not buy them anymore.
I think it's likely that there'll still be specialization - some robots/AI will be better at some tasks than others. On top of that, physical/natural resources may be owned by different people. So maybe you need tungsten and I need someone to build a space elevator, so we trade.
I have seen AI improve the quality and velocity of my wife's policy analysis dramatically.
She doesn't like using Claude, but she accepts the necessity of doing so, and it reduces 3-month projects to 2-week projects. Claude is an excellent debating partner.
Crypto? Blockchain? No-one sceptical could ever see the point of either, unless and until their transaction costs were less than that of cash. That... has not happened, to put it mildly.
that was not the sentiment people had in 2017. they were almost certain every major visa card provider and payment gateway on the planet will scrap fiat cash and adopt crypto just like how they are all thinking about every major software company adopting AI. Dont forget hindsight bias
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