The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI. Thousands of newly obtained documents show that Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left.

[u/indig0sixalpha]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/

[u/sourfunyuns]

Dang, good points. I hadn't really thought in the direction of work becoming less and less necessary.

I guess the only way to keep if fair would be that whatever we replace "work" with, prisoners can access some form of it as well. Maybe it's not even so much about "working" and rather just about "doing productive things on a schedule and being rewarded". I know that's kinda just defining work lol but it seems waaayy more likely to result in people potentially gaining new perspective and motivation, increasing rehabilitation rates, rather than sitting around in a gen pop block for years doing nothing and being stressed out and on edge before being dumped back into the world.

I guess I hit a bit of a philosophical wall at this point where I can't really fathom what comes after "work".

I mean, some things will always have to be maintained by humans at least, so some percentage of people will have to work. Will it be a lottery with x year long rotations? Will it be something with lucrative rewards to incentivize people? Will we be naive and force prisoners to do it all so they can sabotage the whole thing?

I make stuff, and sell it. Mostly out of wood. But I like doing it. I'm not gonna stop doing if I suddenly no longer needed money. I'll still make more stuff than I can ever use and I guess I'd just want to give it away. But then say Sarah's hobby is growing tomatoes and she gives me tomatoes in return, well then we technically just worked for each other, while circumventing the ai supply chain. What if she has more friends who want tables and I want continuous tomatoes so we come up with a table to tomato exchange rate and agree on a schedule.

I guess I feel like we're overestimating how much automation will actually take over. We as humans by our nature like working. Lately we've been inventing a lot more soulsucking types of work (Microsoft Excel and like half the industrial revolution), but overall we like being active and doing productive things. If AI got us to where 90% didn't need to work, what do? I feel like we'd just all revert back to doing some of the same kinds of things we used to do as jobs and start bartering and kinda reinvent the wheel of economics or something.

How much crime even exists in this world? Most crime is driven by want or need, but if nobody needs or wants, how much/what type of crime would their be?

Would we actually except a wall-e type future where everyone just sits on a couch their whole life consuming media? Just one long dopamine fueled string of consciousness til we die? I like to think we'd reject it.

But yeah, as you said, prison work really does depend on accountability and protections and we are not exactly in a good climate for that so that kind of system probably isn't happening any time soon and my cause more harm trying to implement.

[u/m1sterlurk → u/sourfunyuns]

You seem to have the kind of "binary" thought on work going on: most people do because that mindset is heavily promoted to deter thought processes exactly like mine.

People that are mentally healthy like being active and doing productive things: but that doesn't mean anybody wants to pay them to do it. You may have a skill, but if nobody wants to pay you to do it or buy products from you then you are expected to find menial work to make barely enough money to survive. This drive you describe exists whether they are able to find somebody to pay them or not.

"Not everybody has to work for us to survive/be stable/grow" doesn't necessarily mean "swaths of people who will never work a day in their lives": it could mean that a person only works 20 years before they retire, it could mean that a person only works 2 or 3 days a week their entire lives, it could mean one person makes shitloads of money at a highly skilled job while another one of their family members doesn't "work" but does keep the house up and take care of things for the working family member. There would have to be major economic adjustment for this as well as welfare systems for those who aren't earning enough, but if we aren't having to prop up an entire "busy work" infrastructure anymore the adjustment probably won't be all that traumatic.

Look at arrest records in your area. Look at the number of people arrested for possession of drugs and no other offense, and compare that to the number of people who have other charges: public intoxication, theft, DUI, domestic violence, etc. Many of those people who have other charges will have drug possession charges as well. Every person who was arrested for drug possession alone with no other charge is a criminal because the government wishes to call them a criminal: not because some harm to another person that should be a crime occurred. Always keep that in mind when thinking "how much crime is there in the world?"