Yes, Zeitgeist is
communism in another skin. Adding computers and robots does not make a planned economy work.
Actually the idea of "machines doing all the work" wouldn't be a too alien idea to the people leading the industrial revolution. The machines are indeed doing almost all of it now if you take into account what "work" meant back then.
It's not "robots do all the work" that's the issue here. It's the "AI plans the economy" that causes me to worry.
I think you are confused about what an AI is.
AI doesn't imply self-awareness or conciousness.
Nothing I said required or even implied that the AI that "got it into it's head" that humans were getting in the way would be conscious. A computer system designed to run an economy efficiently would almost by definition see humans as inefficiencies and act to remove them.
You're oversimplifying the problem.
An AI that would see humans as inefficient would never be introduced as it would not function in its role to regulate humans. It would fail from the beginning.
Or do you think we would invent an AI and hook it up to control the whole of humanity just to see if it would work?
Of course not, that would be useless.
We would engineer it to function in a certain way and so we would engineer it so it's task is to make humans survive.
Such an AI would just never consider damaging humans.
The only escape would be if such an AI would somehow acquire self-conciousness so that it can somehow sidestep it's designation and start acting in a way that cannot be stopped by humanity.
But if you see how AI works in practice you can see that this is not a real threat unless we specifically desing an AI that behaves in such a way.