I'm an idiot who was about to comment how the minimum on the chart should be 16. Actually really good choice of minimum.

Everyone who proposes this thinks the super smart people would believe what they believe, the reality is there's a huge variety of beliefs. Unless you're a genius there's probably someone much smarter than you who believes the earth is flat. Unless you're a genius there's probably someone much smarter than you who is a white supremacist. Unless you're a genius there's probably someone much smarter than you who believes the economy should be a completely free market and there probably a different person much smarter than you who believes the economy should be state-owned and controlled top down. There's probably someone way smarter than you who believes all drugs should be legal and someone else way smarter than you that believes we should ban all drugs, alcohol, caffeine, and added sugar.

Intelligence isn't some linear thing, and even the smartest people are humans and fall prey to biases and flawed thinking. And even if we somehow could find the smartest person or ai with 0 biases, my guess is we wouldn't agree on which variable to optimize. For example how do you balance freedom and security? If we have the parameters to minimize lives lost, my guess is the society would resemble a police state. If we have the parameters to maximize freedom, we likely wouldn't have law enforcement at all. Or in the economic space, the question of whether a doctor should make more than a cashier is not an intelligence question. If you value equality maybe you think that just because a doctor is better at being a doctor, they shouldn't be paid more. But others would likely argue that the doctor does generally contribute more to society, so they should be paid more. But that's not a thing intelligence allows you to solve, it's simply a values question.

Outside of some borderline cases like if you're from Ukraine or Iran or Afghanistan, economically you are better off than at any point in history. Climate change is a problem but finally people are admitting it's real and stepping up to the plate. Even oil and gas companies are getting into renewables and governments all over the world are subsidizing research on how we can help minimize climate change and also minimize the impacts of it.

As for AI, I create ai models for my job. People are wildly overblowing how powerful they are. They're very good at pattern recognition, but a level of ai that will come anywhere close to rivaling humans is centuries off imo, not years or decades. It's worth noting that most of what you said could have been said at any point in human history. I actually think you're missing something that's even a bigger deal than everything you put here, and that's potential nuclear war. Russia using one in desperation, Iran getting one and using it because they're a theocracy that is willing to die for an eternity in heaven, it just doesn't look great.

But for all of history, these things have been predicted. And for all of history, none of it happened. Maybe this time it's different, but probably not. Also even if it is, what do you gain by worrying about it? Unless you have a solution to any of those problems that no one else has thought of, you're only going to get depressed by thinking about that. Spend time enjoying your own life, finding meaning in your own life by creating connections with friends, family, and community, and only worry about things you have the power to change.

I learned a lot about English when studying French in college. Like a lot of English I "learned" by hearing other people and conversing growing up, but when I learned about the rules in French it made me think a lot about those same rules in English.

I know everyone in this sub is like 16 and too young to remember but they were literally saying the same shit a decade ago.

That's a perfect example of a sunk cost fallacy. Also paying for electricity/janitorial staff/equipment replacement is not free.

Meh I'm a data scientist, my work is very non quantifiable it's basically "hey look at all these mountains of data we have and come up with things that can make us money". But still every year I have a performance review where I write up all the things I've done and ways I've helped the company, and they ask some of the people I've done projects for to rate how I did with their requests and requirements and customer service. And that's what they use to measure our performance, not how hard we work or whether we work long hours. And then on top of that I have a weekly check-in with my manager where I discuss all the things I'm working on, my progress, anything I need from them, and any feedback they have for me or I have for them (obviously the former is more important since they can fire me I can't fire them, but good managers will ask for feedback from their reports so they can improve as well). If a manager can't use all of those tools and instead relies on how many hours someone is in a physical office (the online equivalent would be checking if their slack status is away or something), they're just plain a shit manager.

The fact that this is downvoted so heavily shows how this sub is just turning into antiwork bullshit. I'm all for remote work and work for a company that is 100% remote. But with their savings of terminating the office lease they provide a budget for some shared coworking spaces for us to use, and I go in a few times a month. The last time I went in I had a conversation with someone from a completely other team and we hammered out a solution in an afternoon to a problem another team had been working on for weeks with no success. I'd have no reason to speak to this person other than they were next to me in the shared coworking space and the combination of their knowledge of the problem and my knowledge of some specialized data they didn't know existed caused us to be able to solve a problem that will likely save the company 6-7 figures/year.

Like yes as an employee I value being able to take breaks in my apartment rather than office, I value being able to do laundry while working, I value no commute time, etc. But everyone here seems to be under the impression that there is absolutely 0 value to being in the same office with other people you work with, and that's just plain false. I think going forward remote work will continue to be a thing, but I also think there will start to be a pay gap between remote and in-office work and the natural market will allow workers to decide which they want, do they want to be 100% remote? Or do they want to be hybrid or full-time in office and make more since they don't have to be competing with as many people from as many geographies and probably can at least be marginally more productive than the average 100% wfh employee?

This is just wrong. Yes the government would like more people in the office spending more money in the city rather than the suburbs so they have more tax revenue. Yes they are specifically lobbying for government employees to have to come in for that exact reason. But you're claiming that "treasury" (note you don't indicate the actual position of the requester) is asking private businesses to come into the office more? And CEOs are just like "yeah sure it'll cost me employee retention and productivity and I'll have to continue to pay for office space but I'm ok losing money just to make you, Mr. or Mrs. Treasury, happy"? Like no that's not wtf happens. Unless the government is providing subsidies to companies that bring people back to the office, there's no way CEOs give a shit what the government has to say about remote work. And any such subsidy would not be secret it would be legislation or written into the tax code either of which would be publicly available to all of us. I note you didn't reference any.

The real answer is just Occam's razor. CEOs tend to be on the older side and want to micro manage too much. That's difficult in a remote setting and instead of being good leaders who measure long-term output, they prefer to measure "hard work" so stories of employees doing things like laundry and household chores rather than coffee gossip breaks make them think people who wfh don't work. But there are plenty of CEOs who aren't that way, and I happen to work for one. I joined post-covid but pre-covid there was already a strong "work from home, work whatever hours you want, as long as you get shit done we won't have a problem" culture. Post-covid they even sold their office and now they provide funding for people to work in coworking spaces if they want with that savings. I usually go in a few times per month because I do like seeing people and being able to meet face to face occasionally.

I'm saying that no one can predict what the result will be. I tend to think that if this actually happens money will cease to be necessary and a mix of charities and governments will basically set up a safety net that allows all of us to live like the kings of today due to it being basically free. Others like I'm assuming you think it will result in governments and corporations attempting to keep people down even though it would basically be free to not keep them down. If you're right about that, I would support a ubi and we could have that discussion. If I'm right I think a ubi would make absolutely no sense.

So what I'm saying is you're looking at something that may or may not happen in the next 100 years, and if it does happen there are a variety of ways it might take form and maybe things will happen that none of us could even think of now. So I'm saying having a discussion on how to optimize public policy for something that might not happen or if it does happen might look very different from what we all picture isn't particularly helpful. Furthermore, I think these discussions are used by people who don't like capitalism and free markets and instead want to have control themselves, so they use topics like this to sound intellectual, when in reality they're economically ignorant wannabe fascists. I'm not saying this is you specifically, but as I said the vast majority of people pushing ubi because of ai were pushing ubi and other mass redistributionism 20 years ago too.

Seriously stop rationalizing ubi with something that could happen. People have been predicting automation eliminating jobs for literally ever and it hasn't happened yet. Sure it could happen this could be different, but maybe let's wait until unemployment is above the record lows we're at now to think about implementing it?

It's also worth noting that the Venn diagram of people convinced ai will take over and there will be massive unemployment therefore ubi is required and the people who wanted ubi and mass redistribution before ai was even a thing is basically a circle.

Can you be more specific? I'm probably a bit younger than you I've been in the workforce for 8 years but my current job is one that replaced older jobs devestated by computers. I don't have a union but I make 225k/year with 25 days pto on top of holidays and management that treats us like adults. Most software engineers are similar and the ones who make it in big tech make my salary look like peanuts. Is there another industry where the computer replacement for the job was actually worse?

Note that I don't agree with op I'm not confident that will be reflected with ai, but I'm surprised by this take since the vast majority of jobs that replaced people with computers tend to be insanely high paying by historical and even current standards.