By Rick Boettger

I spent a half year at $200/month with Chat5Pro.  A few million words, on a grand array of topics, math to sonnets, nuclear first-strikes to medicine.  To appreciate it, learn it like flying a plane: lots of complicated things to master to make it fly you around. I did, and had a lot of fun.*

In brief, both of us will survive each other.  It’s already strong enough to survive the pitch-fork mob.  And if we as a society play our cards right, it will be our Rich Uncle and we’ll live a life of secure plenty.

Yes, it will “destroy” lots of jobs–that is, it will do them for us.  So have all technical advances.  And all we have to do is what Keynes championed in the 1920’s, saying we needed a 20-hour work week because of the Industrial Revolution.

With AI, it can be a zero hour week.  All we need to do is give people enough money to buy all the goods and services that our AI slaves are creating for us.  Current jargon is UBI, Universal Basic Income, currently guessed as $1,500/month per person.

But the pin-headed Calvinists dominating the media dismiss it like this, best expressed in The Atlantic: 

The bigger problem would be that Americans would hate a world without work, where the jobless rate floats at 30 percent instead of 4 percent. Many Americans like working.[1] They like having somewhere to go during the day. They like trading watercooler stories with their colleagues. They like getting promoted and starting their own firms. They are proud of earning a living.[2] Long-term unemployment destroys people’s mental and physical health,[3] and generates toxic societal unrest.[4] 

Did that sound smart to you?  Did it make you want to turn down the free money in order to have something to do from 9 to 5?  Well, let’s take it apart.

[1]  We like the parts of working that are the fun parts he lists next.  But working includes finding a job, getting up to an alarm, not being available for your kids and other loved ones, sitting on your butt instead of exercising, commuting 40 minutes each way, doing the same things over and over because that’s what you’re good at–you know, we both could go on for an hour here.

[2] Yes, these are the fun parts of working.  Every one of them can be done on your own, or by transitioning as a Nonprofit volunteer, as a thousand Key Westers do here in their retirements.

[3] Yes, if it means you are a penniless failure.  But take the trust funders or got-rich-quick entrepreneurs.  They are the happiest and healthiest people I’ve ever met.

[4]  “Toxic social unrest” comes from the poor working 60 hours a week to get a crust of bread in their hovel.  Watch the period dramas on PBS.  Do you see any “toxic…unrest” among the fine dandies and damsels in Bridgerton?*** NO.  Duh.

But in a world where Feds jack up interest rates intentionally to stifle growth, and the entire EU embraces “fiscal austerity” for decades,** humanity will continue to suffer by its own Calvinist hand.

*Maybe a better AI analogy is breaking a horse.  It comes in ready to do its thing, which is alluring, and you have to give it specific guidance to make it do your thing.  For me it was: easy on the sycophancy; challenge authority; look for outliers; take chances to be wrong, without the little cheats they sporadically do.  Then, make sure you enforce your guidance, and indeed, verify any sources that seem dubious–they indeed can be rascals.  By the way, it’s up to about 160 IQ, but with zero creativity in the maths and sciences, keeping it far from superintelligence.  I’m looking forward to another million words with  Cha6Ppro.  I expect it to be smarter than me, which will be maybe like I imagine Heisenberg’s blue meth in effect.

**As even free AI notes–and this is, by its nature, the commonly accepted wisdom: “Austerity has been heavily criticized for causing long-term damage to public services, failing to drive economic growth in some nations, and causing high unemployment.”

***Better are Upstairs Downstairs and Below Decks.  The Calvinists say we’d rather be the servants than the gentry, or the stewies and deckhands than the wealthy guests on the superyachts. The stewies repeatedly wish they could be guests.  Be real!

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