Yeah, we're basically screwed. I'll try to think of something anyway.
The goal is to redistribute wealth, from the rich to the poor. Doing it directly seems impossible. But we could do it indirectly, by redistributing power.
I think one of the most powerful lever currently available is unemployment. Currently, employees fear it, so they accept lower wages. If unemployment where somehow less terrible, or less common, employees would have more power, and higher salaries. Of the top of my head, I see two ways:
Universal income. It makes unemployment less unpleasant. If it gives you enough money, one could chose to just retire early and live frugally. I agree it sounds too communist however. I don't see it happening, especially in the US.
Reduce work hours. Go down to 4 days a week, while maintaining current salaries. There will be need for more people, which will mean less unemployment. When automation goes up again, go down to 3 days. And down. And down. This one sounds more plausible, but again, not in the US. The second someone talks about a 4 week day is the second you see some Republican stir up emotions about righten up the country through virtuous hard work. Maybe it could work in Europe (one country at a time), then spread. But we need to get past the idea that hard work is sacred first.
We could also spread basic rationality and basic political awareness. But frankly, this is difficult: most people don't have the energy to think when they get back home. They just watch TV, and collapse until tomorrow morning. This would change if they worked less, but you see the chicken-and-egg problem here…
Another possibility is the internet. Compared to mainstream media, ideas flow unfiltered here. As more people learn to use it, we will have more and more meaningful many-to-many communications, of which 4chan is only a baby step.
Mechanical Engineering magazine (paywalled until next month) and Financial Times, among others, recently reviewed the book Race Against the Machine by economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The FT reviewer writes:
And ME magazine quotes McAfee in an interview:
Both reviewers also hint that McAfee and Brynjolfsson offer a partial explanation of the "jobless recovery", but either the book's argument is weak or the reviewers do a poor job summarizing it. Such a purported explanation might be the main attraction for most readers, but I'm more interested in the longer-term picture. Be it the "nightmarish vision" of the future mentioned in FT, or the simpler point about wages offered by McAfee, this might be a good hook to get the general public thinking about the long-term consequences of AI.
Is that a good idea? Should sleeping general publics be left to lie? There seems to be significant reluctance among many LessWrongers to stir the public, but have we ever hashed out the reasons for and against? Please describe any non-obvious reasons on either side.