I’m sympathetic to the use of generative AIs insofar as I want society to advance to something very close to Federation society in Star Trek.
Three or four centuries from now, humanity has faced several brutal wars and has come together finally to establish a utopia. The society is moneyless and classless, and the state as much as it exists is a mechanism for mutual aid to other aligned planets. I won’t go into too much lore but this is allowed because the matter replicator eliminates scarcity; almost any material good including food can be created out of essentially nothing.
What that means for society is that, as a member of the Federation, you can do literally anything you want with your life. Want to study art and become a sculptor? Excellent, you don’t need to pay rent or buy food so you can do that to your heart’s content. You don’t even need to be good at it. Want to be a farmer on a vineyard in France and make excellent wine? Great. Want to be a farmer on a vineyard that grows grapes to make raisins? Again, you do you. Run a Cajun restaurant in New Orleans if you want; you don’t have to buy ingredients and your customers don’t have to pay, so the only people that do anything are the people who actually want to be there.
Back to the real world. Almost everyone in university is there because they need a job to receive money in order to pay for the things they need to survive, and the job requirements say “this degree is required”. Plenty of people become engineers, for example, because they know the pay will be good, not because they have an intrinsic desire to be engineers. Plenty of people who get engineering degrees stay in engineering roles they hate (or who would do other things if the pay was as good) for the same reason, even though plenty of engineering jobs might only require 2% of what was learned during the course of the degree, if that. The degree is a bureaucratic requirement for survival in a capitalist system and not an actual measure of ability, skill, or desire. That same capitalist system will discard them the minute they stop being useful. This doesn’t exactly breed contentment and a willingness to contribute to the greater good of humanity like we see in Star Trek.
Using AI to pass these arbitrary requirements needed to exist in an arbitrary society I find to be understandable. If we want people to go to school for the sake of learning, to better themselves as human beings, that would be a different situation altogether, but that is no where near the system we have actually set up.
man, that’s a whole lot of fantasy wrapped up around a tool that’s propping up fascist oligarchs that are driving the world into a forced plutocracy where we’re all enslaved to work for “the company”.
I’m sympathetic to the use of generative AIs insofar as I want society to advance to something very close to Federation society in Star Trek.
Three or four centuries from now, humanity has faced several brutal wars and has come together finally to establish a utopia. The society is moneyless and classless, and the state as much as it exists is a mechanism for mutual aid to other aligned planets. I won’t go into too much lore but this is allowed because the matter replicator eliminates scarcity; almost any material good including food can be created out of essentially nothing.
What that means for society is that, as a member of the Federation, you can do literally anything you want with your life. Want to study art and become a sculptor? Excellent, you don’t need to pay rent or buy food so you can do that to your heart’s content. You don’t even need to be good at it. Want to be a farmer on a vineyard in France and make excellent wine? Great. Want to be a farmer on a vineyard that grows grapes to make raisins? Again, you do you. Run a Cajun restaurant in New Orleans if you want; you don’t have to buy ingredients and your customers don’t have to pay, so the only people that do anything are the people who actually want to be there.
Back to the real world. Almost everyone in university is there because they need a job to receive money in order to pay for the things they need to survive, and the job requirements say “this degree is required”. Plenty of people become engineers, for example, because they know the pay will be good, not because they have an intrinsic desire to be engineers. Plenty of people who get engineering degrees stay in engineering roles they hate (or who would do other things if the pay was as good) for the same reason, even though plenty of engineering jobs might only require 2% of what was learned during the course of the degree, if that. The degree is a bureaucratic requirement for survival in a capitalist system and not an actual measure of ability, skill, or desire. That same capitalist system will discard them the minute they stop being useful. This doesn’t exactly breed contentment and a willingness to contribute to the greater good of humanity like we see in Star Trek.
Using AI to pass these arbitrary requirements needed to exist in an arbitrary society I find to be understandable. If we want people to go to school for the sake of learning, to better themselves as human beings, that would be a different situation altogether, but that is no where near the system we have actually set up.
Touch grass.
man, that’s a whole lot of fantasy wrapped up around a tool that’s propping up fascist oligarchs that are driving the world into a forced plutocracy where we’re all enslaved to work for “the company”.
I thought the backstory was important to help to cross all my T’s and dot all my… lower case J’s