The social contract when labour is automated

Submitted by Current_Side_4024 t3_zp2gpp in singularity

Our social contract has historically been based around labour. People demonstrate their value by doing work that at least theoretically serves the greater whole. And they do this work at least theoretically pretty much everyday, most of their lives. People know they can trust someone bc they do a job. That’s the logic we use anyway to organize ourselves. Those who do not work are seen as inherently untrustworthy, an enemy of the state, someone who should be belittled.

If automation takes over most of the jobs, we will no longer have a means of identifying people. We won’t know who is trustworthy and who isn’t. The whole social contract will be shredded. We will need a new social contract, and it hasn’t been written yet. Nobody knows what it will say bc we don’t yet have a need to write it, though that need is growing day by day.

Many people assume that without the existing social contract, it will be chaos, and everyone will die. But that’s foolishness. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. I think we just need to admit that we don’t know how we will relate to each other in the future, but that doesn’t mean we won’t relate to each other at all. There is a future waiting for us, but we don’t yet know what it is. It won’t be chaos and death though. Society has changed before and it will change again. Whenever it changes, there’s always a lot of people who think this is the end. But society is flexible, far more flexible than we realize.

That’s my two cents.

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j0qtb62 wrote

The social contract is written in your laws. There is no other social contract. Do not kill, do not steal etc., and others will do likewise.

Paid „work“ is nothing else but the consequence of feudalism and the continuation of slavery. It has only become a „thing“ after the development of agriculture and land ownership. Those who own, don’t work, those who work, don’t own. Feudalism; not even capitalism. People are always mad about capitalism, yet it is an illusion and a diverting of attention from real issues - namely those based in land ownership and hereditary wealth.

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Skylab_is_Falling t1_j0qfg4y wrote

This honestly makes no sense to me. We all know that work is a requirement for living in society, the choice to accept that conveys very little in the way trustworthiness.

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Born_Cheetah4029 t1_j0rke09 wrote

I'm don't understand what you mean. Do you mean that some work needs to be done by someone or something in order for modern society to exist? Or do you mean that everyone needs to work in order for them to participate in society?

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SoylentRox t1_j0qg7qw wrote

Generally speaking the more education a person has and the more difficult their career is to enter/how long they have been in it correlate with them having more to lose. Sure they may be a crook - sometimes high corporate officials like directors and vice presidents get caught committing petty crimes - but it means they probably aren't going to rape you or mug you for your wallet. Because they have a lot to lose, and also they can get what they want other ways.

It's not a guaranteed rule but there almost certainly is heavy statistical correlation, where the most dangerous person to be around is the homeless man, the low end retail/fast food worker is less dangerous but still dangerous if they aren't young, and so on up the totem pole. With the notable exception that criminality may actually increase at the very top.

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EscapeVelocity83 t1_j0r4moo wrote

Rich people are more likely to lie about stealing candy from a baby if they think they can get away with it

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purple_hamster66 t1_j0qx9kx wrote

In 1980 it took 1000 people to build a car. Now it takes 250, due to automation (eg, robots). What happened to the other 750 people? They moved on to other fields. Retrained.

Your worth is what you are, not what you do. People are extended by automation, not replaced.

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AbobusSusSusNekker t1_j11l3tx wrote

Oh I love made up analogies (which are not inherently arguments, look up formal logic) with made up statistics. Thanks to your sheer perspicacity I'm now completely sure that after having honed my craft and suffered through intensive formal education for years on end I'll just "retrain" or "move on to other (which ones exactly remains a mystery) fields".
Surely, even the 750 people from your imagination all successfully retrained to become professionals in completely novel fields of work in their 30s-40s-50s. None of them drank themselves to death out of the feeling of utter uselessness; none of them lost their families, which they couldn't support anymore; none of them turned to crime, thus ruining communities, lives of other people; none of them committed suicide after becoming homeless. If you love car analogies so much, maybe take a look at the fine city of Detroit and its recent history, what an absolute fairy tale.

All the robotics that have been implemented throughout a very narrow range of industries and locales have been heavily regulated, which prevented a lot of manufacturing facilities going all robot.
"But the big daddy from OpenAI/Microsoft told us that we will all receive 13k as basic income, I'll buy all the funkopop superhero toys on Earth with that money, while not doing anything at all!"

They sure can't just exploit their property rights on this technology, or just get rid of those pesky mediocre humans, as whatever their hearts desire could be fulfilled by one very advanced AI model and a bunch of specialised robots, instead of thousands of hard-working interns, seasoned professionals and laborious technicians.

Humankind has always been about suffering through life. Our entire knowledge systems, works of art and world cultures are built by and around people who sacrificed their comfort, well-being and time on this planet to discover something, achieve a goal, become a source of wisdom, knowledge and mastery. No matter how unique their field of work is. Automation of all work that has a sliver of creativity element to it culls the entire human population to the left of 2nd standard deviation above the mean, leaving only a very limited number of geniuses (who got to be born, raised an educated in the best combination of circumstances) still necessary to advance knowledge and oversee the work of whatever AI system that will end up performing the best.
Who will the future children look up to? Some abstract mathematical concept known as a transformer machine learning model?
That is if there will be any children in the future anyway...

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purple_hamster66 t1_j14kfu3 wrote

I’m not following most of your rant, like why you think a car factory worker in 1980 was skilled labor that took years to learn. Most simply bolted fenders on cars.

What you got right is that life is hard, and we all do what we can to improve our lot in life. Automation simply replaces the stuff no one wants to do (bolt fenders in place) with stuff we do want to do (design a better bolt). In the 1800s, few people could read; today, due to the industrial revolution, most people can read (in the US) — that’s a good thing, right? The 2nd standard deviation of 1800 doesn’t even exist in modern times, because the entire curve shifted. Yet you think that stopping the curve from shifting again is a good thing? Would you give up your electronics & software, much of which was designed by automated processes?

There is no social contract for labor.

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Borrowedshorts t1_j0sk9tm wrote

This is mostly right. People definitely get more respect when they work. Just a personal example, I delayed going into the workforce for awhile because I was working on a research project that I myself was extremely proud of more than any job would bring. But my family couldn't understand why I was doing the project let alone putting off work for it. It's just something that they couldn't connect with. OP is definitely right that there's a social contact of sorts where you attain a higher status because you have a job, and even better a career, and also if you get married, or have kids. I for one can't wait until this social contract tying work with respect gets destroyed.

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SteppenAxolotl t1_j0q7in3 wrote

>Many people assume that without the existing social contract, it will be chaos

There is no existing social contract, it never existed. It was just some philosophical nonsense that was bandied about.

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jdmcnair t1_j0qtr4r wrote

This is a pretty useless critique without further elaboration. Obviously some people end up living in mansions and others end up in prison for life, so there's some loose scheme of valuation at play, even if that scheme is fundamentally bogus or unjust.

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SteppenAxolotl t1_j0r3jt4 wrote

That dynamic has nothing to do with social contracts. That is simply the natural outcome of capitalism in the case of ending up in a mansion. Ending up in prison is simply the natural outcome of wanting a nice life and being too lazy or stupid to create those conditions yourself, taking it from those that can is the easiest pathway.

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EscapeVelocity83 t1_j0r53ta wrote

It's like when we had wars the losers went to prison death or slavery

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SteppenAxolotl t1_j0r7bnj wrote

It's nothing like that.

Expecting strangers to work to support you and, as expected, when they refuse which will require you to support yourself, that inst the same as condemning you to slavery. Trying to force strangers to work to support you would be the same as enslaving them.

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curloperator t1_j0zxumo wrote

>Trying to force strangers to work to support you would be the same as enslaving them.

Kind of like how the rich have constructed a system whereby they force us to work for them at thier companies in order to eat

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SteppenAxolotl t1_j1z5z2s wrote

Except the rich are maybe 20% of the electorate, the 80% is more responsible for the system. That's you.

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Affectionate-Unit96 t1_j0td2lz wrote

Then you have SBF, who has both lived in a mansion and some of the shittiest jails on earth.

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jdmcnair t1_j0vo0qa wrote

I mean, I think you and I are agreeing that the dynamic is mostly bogus, but whatever we think of it, that pretty much is the social contract. People are assigned worth roughly based on their overall value proposition to society. If they are more useful than detrimental, they get a reasonably fair shake (though that has been rapidly changing in recent decades). A person's utility may be wrapped up in possession of resources that they inherited through no merit of their own, and their detriment may be tied to environmental reasons beyond their control, but it's still what they'll be judged on, fair or not.

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j0sgnxe wrote

Most people ending up in mansions live in those mansions from birth. This is a case of hereditary wealth (feudalism).

Most people who actually go to prison have never lived in mansions but would really love too.

Most people who have not lived in mansions from birth will never live in mansions.

Risking prison is one way to acquire mansions which will be transferred to your descendants via feudalism.

This is also the case how the first mansions were acquired.

Wealth breeds wealth, not merit. And wealth is only rarely bred by merit. It is usually ceased by strength and egoism.

And once you have mansions, you won’t land in prison usually as you will be able to afford good lawyers, caution payments and bribes.

There are very rarely people who lived in mansions once and now live in prison. This is a case of her. bad luck mostly, or of having pissed off someone who owns more mansions.

It has nothing to do with social contract and has everything to do with people going against it in the past to acquire wealth by taking it from all others, and just pretending it didn’t happen generations later.

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EscapeVelocity83 t1_j0r4yo2 wrote

I'd imagine the computer will offer genetic alterations in lieu of prison since behavior is all genetically derived

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EulersApprentice t1_j0roxr1 wrote

Hrm... that sounds to me like a bit of an oversimplification. A building is derived from its blueprint, but once the building is constructed, changing or destroying the blueprint doesn't do anything to the building, you know?

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curloperator t1_j0zyp6j wrote

Except that's not how DNA works. Our genetics are not just a static blueprint, they are also part of the construction team and our bodies and minds are being constantly constructed 24/7 based on the blueprint. So in the case of genetics, if you change the blueprint, the building will automatically and actively get reconstructed in real time based on the changes. So in this case yes, changing the blueprint automatically begins to change the building.

EDIT: spelling

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Emu_Fast t1_j0s1oyt wrote

Feudalism. That's where it's headed. Wealth inequality has created the conditions that match that time period, and bad faith actors like Peter Thiel are setting up the tech to rapidly enable it.

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AnythingWillHappen t1_j0sdeye wrote

In this iteration of feudalism, what would human peasants do?

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j0sh4mf wrote

What they do now. Either „work“ or „live on wellfare“ or „survive on the streets somehow“ or „be provided for by parents or partners or friends“ or „die“ or „become criminal and try to acquire noble status“.

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Ischmetch t1_j0qcu9z wrote

There have always been people with the means of coercion, and then there are the rest of us. That’s your contract.

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True-Bullfrog-6587 t1_j0r9ovp wrote

Technologies like neurolink will provide a new role for displaced workers. Our personal thoughts and emotions are priceless data for training ai on behavioral compliance and optimization strategies. Wired-headed data pigs will supplement computer driven problem solving with functions the human brain still excels at. Our natural lateral thinking ability will be goosed even further by legalized drugs and implant initiated neurotransmitter floods. This new segment of society wouldn't even need to be paid above a universal basic income. They will gladly participate in a gameified problem solving scheme that delivers dopamine rewards and personalized ai created dynamic media.

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Marphigor t1_j0rrktj wrote

The classical philosophical doctrine of “social contract” has nothing to do with labour… well, maybe just Locke’s version and only in regards to property but the main idea is still “natural right”. So… I don’t understand your point… maybe cite your sources?

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nutidizen t1_j0s4owp wrote

> demonstrate their value by doing work

No.

> least theoretically serves the greater whole.

No? People act on the free market. Sell stuff (including your labor) for different stuff (eg. money).

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priscilla_halfbreed t1_j0r5jmu wrote

I think it will be based on what you choose to "do" as a career/goal lifepath. Like even in a utopea where 100% of everything is taken care of by AI/bots and we have free infinite food/shelter/leisure, people will still pursue things. I imagine there would still be artists, rappers, movie creators, sports athletes, etc

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QuietOil9491 t1_j0tg7cx wrote

The problem is the wealthy have always oppressed the poor. Technology has often first enhanced these tendencies. It’s not always guaranteed that we will survive the abuse of a new technology against humanity. AI absolutely has the capacity to destroy humanity.

It’s entirely upon the 0.001% to not utterly fuck over humanity but that would mean they would have to willingly give up wealth, power, and inequality; which are their core values

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