https://futurism.com/the-byte/government-ai-worse-summarizing
The upshot: these AI summaries were so bad that the assessors agreed that using them could require more work down the line, because of the amount of fact-checking they require. If that’s the case, then the purported upsides of using the technology — cost-cutting and time-saving — are seriously called into question.
What do your preparations look like?
Preparing my life to change from unemployment mostly. Paying off debts, figuring out how to best allocate the cash flow I currently have into some kind of durable savings. Making connections in my community and continuing to learn to grow my own food. General materialist / “prepper” fare honestly. Useful for any existential collapse, automation being just one of many scenarios.
I’ve been thinking about this comment a lot over the last couple of days. I do my research in agriculture and food systems so I’ve had a lot of exposure to the “future is rural” philosophy, but it’s mainly in the context of climate change. It seems like anyone talking sense about the trajectory our society is on is quietly buying small plots of land for smallholder agriculture or posting about how farms are probably going to stop supplying food systems and start focusing on meeting their own needs as conditions get less hospitable. It’s interesting to consider that there’s a convergent response emerging as a result of automation.
Meanwhile I’m sitting here on my small expensive urban plot that couldn’t sustain more than some summer vegetables because I thought I’d get bored doing actual agriculture
I’m not as worried about the food production stuff as some others. It hasn’t been profitable to make market gardening or small scale farming a viable career for a long time for most people. Because of that we haven’t seen as much focus on local farming as we need. Yet. We all know that’s going to start changing rapidly soon.
A single person can grow loads of potatoes in a pretty small area. My only issue, especially for other leftists is that the skills to do so might take you a few seasons to acquire. So get out there and start growing. If you haven’t yet, it’s kind of a bad time in North America, but read up on it this winter and try to grow some taters starting next spring. Use containers or whatever you can get your hands on for your context.
I don’t know that we’ll start starving anytime soon, but I think the cost of everything will make life unbearable, and when it does, people will suddenly discover their green thumbs like in the old days.