In the last 50 years, Western civilisation learned how to do more with less. In the century before, we simply invented new and new ways of throwing more and more non-renewable resources onto all problems we had. Which isn't really all that hard to do - for as long as you may come up with sources for those resources.
Now we do better.
My point here is that even following a big Kuhnian paradigm shift you're still going to have the same human psychologies to deal with and that's precisely where, "consumerism" lives-- in consumers; the idea that, "consumerism" is somehow driven by ideology or how capitalism structures society seems to be naive in my view. Conspicuous consumption still takes place in supposedly, "destratified" societies-- see the Kim family of North Korea or rich Saudis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Clas...
the AI revolution has barely begun: https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/
neural nets work with any information on any task. just like your brain. except you can train/copy them relatively instantly in comparison to raising/educating a 25 year old.
I'll make you a bet that in the next 5 years we have high resolution video generation through DALL-E or the like and it's primary use case is going to be auto-generating pornographic advertisements. The Internet was developed with lofty ideals in mind; what is AI's lofty ideal? The end of labor? The end of creativity? The commodification of innovation?
You've got 50 meaningful social problems you've got to solve (education, inequality, globalization, power laws) before you've got a kind of society that can integrate automated systems into itself without creating easy to predict problems. Given historical realities it's far more likely that the great wealth created by a theoretical, "AI Summer" will be unevenly enjoyed by most people; again this is the historical norm.
The invention of the tractor didn't liberate farmers from labor. The Phoebus Cartel, "invented" planned obsolescence in modern design and we still consume, "limited life" lightbulbs partially as a result of their thinking, and for the most part the Internet hasn't fostered a generation of scientists and engineers by, "democratizing" information.
I'm literally writing this from a computational biology conference where researchers are presenting on how ML accelerates the development of therapeutics to reduce human suffering: https://www.iscb.org/ismb2022-program/abstracts/mlcsb
It's a magic trick which preys on a person's lack of scientific understanding; neural networks seem to anticipate, "brains in vats" but we're still in the midst of learning what, "brains" "people" and, "minds" are and nothing in ML space seems to shed any meaningful light on these pressing questions. This might be partially because the questions of Mind(s) and Self(s) are open philosophical problems.
An easy refutation that, "ML can model meaning" from recent Chomsky talks: consider that a neural network can be trained on any statistically meaningful corpus of text; this includes Klingon and Elven; it also includes jibberish'. It also includes semi-random presses of a key by a person typing with their dick or the like; nothing meaningful is being captured. We have a machine that is capable of statistical analysis. This isn't a new invention.
