It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it?
Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high.
A leap of faith is required and sometimes things don't happen the way we expect but it's better than aiming for nothing.
The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.
And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.
This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.
But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.
> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.
The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions
Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.
> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat
Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive
It's always the choice between flying cars and living in a hut made of cow dung, right? No in between is conceivable by the human brain, either boundless growth or the Neolithic
I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.
A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.
Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.
I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.
Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.
> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)
I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost
Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.
You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.
If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.
At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?
Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht
What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?
While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.
Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.
UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
I’m talking about how many people lived in the past
OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly.
It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.
Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.
This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
> You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want.
The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working
Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.
Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
In theory in a robot economy you'll have 100% of the food and shelter you need to some standard, hopefully a decent one. The particular issue with how the world currently is is some people have 60% of their food and shelter while other people have 30000%
That's assuming all of your current pay is going to necessities - salaries here pay well in excess provided your 'wants' are few, you can cover the things that matter (housing, food, etc) and get your time back.
Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.
That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think
> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around.
Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.
It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.
People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.
Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.
Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.
Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining.
Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.
There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter.
If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more.
Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.
I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans.
Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.
I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"
The important question is, who has power in such an economy?
In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.
Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.
I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.
Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights.
If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.
I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.
>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment.
You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on.
You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters.
You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either.
You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips.
You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house.
Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm.
You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work.
A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is.
>Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value.
Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes.
That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy"
Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.
No series economist would claim such a thing. In fact, it was all the rage a decade ago for economists to remind everyone that they - in fact - should not be looked at to do this.
> An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Just remember that the US purged left-leaning economists during the cold war and the field re-grew under intense think-tank incentives towards the economic right, so if you think labor/capital dynamics might be important to the AI revolution you really ought to balance your "random" sampling of US economists with some Piketty (Atkinson, Stiglitz, Zucman -- but in an era where reading even one book is considered a herculean feat of focus, "Capital in the Twenty First Century" by Piketty is the canonical pick).
Piketty is just a marxist flailing around, backfilling data to fit his belief that communism is the solution for every problem. He's been spectacularly wrong in his predictions so far, for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.
> A visit to the Soviet Union in 1991 was enough to make him a firm "believe[r] in capitalism, private property and the market"
Ok, that's what he says, but what does he want? Does he want to eliminate social classes (communism)? Eliminate private ownership of the means of production (socialism)?
> His 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, relies on economic data going back 250 years to show that an ever-rising concentration of wealth is not self-correcting. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth.
No, looks like he just wants taxes. Case closed: this is instance #54367 of an economic conservative pretending that it's marxism to tax a penny from a billionaire. And you call yourself "pirate"? Sigh.
Also remember that the Koch Bros (plus numerous other billionaires) have spent billions [0] poisoning economics academia by funding their narcissistic version of pseudo-libertarianism across think tanks, lobbyists, and colleges... They're so "Libertarian" they believe corporate dictatorship is freedom and poisoning their communities is the communities problem.
I remember first going to a party at an Economics students house 20 years ago, and thinking they all seemed like they were in a cult. Wasn't until fairly recently I figured out it was from propaganda.
junior trader for a bank looses $10 mil. boss asks him what happened. trader says he sold oil because bank economist said oil price will go down. boss fires him. junior asks how could he become a good trader if he's fired on the first losing trade. boss says "no, you idiot, I didn't fire you because you made a losing trade, I fired you because you listened to our economist"
I come from a research background, and transitioned to software later. There is an interesting tendency of software engineers to believe they have skills outside of their skillset.
Relevant here: the would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Part of my software engineering skillset is "going native" with subject matter experts to be able to get more out out of them and even work around the lack of sufficient SME on a project.
I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.
Sounds like a similar track, and I agree that its a useful skill and talent.
What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.
> would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Valid point, but it suggests a mathematician who understands the math behind AI is more capable of grasping its trajectory, which is probably not the case.
People who are deep in the inner workings of this stuff day in and day out are the only ones who have a chance at having any real insight.
I think more broadly that grabbing attention with predictions and hot takes has become lucrative, and we definitely don’t celebrate prediction accuracy.
If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, in fact, don't listen to anyone, no one was able to predict what the economy was going to do pre-AI, no one has any clue what's going on.
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence.
That was pushed over the top by hype and overfunding before it was cost effective. Like Uber and Space-X.
I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life.
If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
It’s an economic fallacy that a group of people would get “locked out” of the economy.
If you and I are able to work, but can’t get jobs because robots do all the jobs, then we’re not just going to sit on our hands and starve. You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.
The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.
Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.
Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.
> The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?
> If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.
No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:
> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.
The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?
I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.
Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.
> The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population.
At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done.
At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison.
The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you.
Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs
Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs
Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison
Population: how did you say we can get them?
A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots.
Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.
>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Governments are no longer allowed to print money. Do you think they will be allowed to build unlimited supply of robots? You are funny.
All the robot factories will belong to rich and we will have to _beg_ to have some measly allocation _while_ we feed the police that prevents us from just taking them.
And politicians will mostly just say this is _inevitable_ for some reason or other.
>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?
As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that.
>Taxes from what..
Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.
The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5].
All these programs poll above majorities in the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too.
If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people."
It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions.
Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)?
People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.
You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.
> The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
Yes, but how it changes depends entirely on who owns the robots.
There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, and huge evidence that self-centered wealthy billionaires (and trillionaires!) will own them.
In such a case, the response to "the robots will make everything" isn't "so give it away to the people for free! :-)". It's "so what do I need all these stupid people for? make killbots to keep them away from my fully-automated luxury oligarchy compound!"
>There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots,
But that is up to the people and their governments to decide. You seem to miss the fact that governments are made by people and for the people, and not made by the billionaires. Even a billionaire have a single vote.
Government can outlaw the private ownership of combat autonomous robots if that is what the people want.
For all the other economic activities that robots don't run? 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.
As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
> 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked.
X for doubt. When automation entered agriculture, we started producing way more for way less. Agriculture stopped becoming a significant part for most developed economies in terms of both GDP contribution and employment.
> All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.
X. The people who lose jobs rarely find something anew - they'll simply become part of an expanding labour pool, further depressing wages. All while some numpty politician would be telling them they need to stop farming and start learning how to code (never mind there's absolutely no point in doing that either).
> As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Figuring out what to produce and how to allocate resources are algorithmically hard problems, even if you know people’s valuation functions. Without some kind of market mechanism to partially reveal valuations it is very difficult indeed. AI is not magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle on your problems to make them go away.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.
And that's communist. I don't understand why nobody seem to see the irony or the miscategorization. This isn't to be critical of this comment, but my righteousness obsessed mind says that people pushing for the dual-layer system where few controls classical economy without humans and rest using their own systems needs to be relabeled from capitalist to proto-Soviet style totalitarian anarcho-Communist.
Or, what the billionaires are actually thinking, remove entire swathes of the population from the equation.
Now the reasonable ones might think "hey, even if that sounds 'rational', isn't that very risky? What happens if the machines don't actually cut it? Then we'd be stuck with not enough people to support our lavish lifestyles? And we can't exactly spin up millions of people in an instant, so where does that leave us?"
Well, they wouldn't be billionaires if they were reasonable so here we are.
As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a billionaire"
You should check out "Four Futures" by Peter Frase. This would be the "extermination" future and like you I think it's the most likely one without extreme counteraction.
>AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
AI could also be able to figure out how much to produce and how to limit waste in a way that leaves you to starve. And there won't be anything you can do about it. And this solution would, it turns out, suit the people who still have influence in how the system works just fine.
>ou and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.
But what would you even trade? Do you have anything that a starving unemployed man who bargain for? And does he have anything you want?
It’s amazing seeing so many people reconstruct socialism and technocratic communism of the 60s from base principles and completely be ignorant of everything we learned about it.
For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.
Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.
One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives.
Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value.
That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top.
If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis.
Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.
We do know about North Korea. It doesn't exist in a bubble. It's a product of a particular culture and a particular series of historical events as well as regional and geopolitical relationships, most notably its relationships with South Korea, China, and the US.
The claim that the North Korean dystopian dictatorship could be generalized to all cultures, across all cultures, merely on the economic and military capabilities of AI, is an extraordinary one. It relies on a great many assumptions about the political as well as independent, personal, and organized responses to the societal changes that would need to take place in order to bring it about.
What AI really seems to be posed to do is make labour a lot less valuable and capital a lot more valuable.
Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
> Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
Why presume that "running a government" is inevitable at all? How much longer do we think these states of old are going to putter on for?
Governments are inevitable. Even when you look at so-called "lawless places" or "failed states", you'll find governments: de-facto governments run by warlords and criminals.
Nature abhors a vacuum and that principle extends to power vacuums.
the economy sucks. the fact that cars cost 30k. the fact that morrocco has high speed rail and california doesn’t. the fact that practically no new housing gets built in san francisco.
the economy needs to get a whole lot better before i would even consider something like this looking true. human demands are wildly elastic, which is why we’re not all farmers riding around in horse drawn carriages still.
I've held this view and talked about it many times here before.
It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat.
Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.
For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?
That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and their rulers fight and trade. Or all of earth is government by one oppressive dictator. So far it seems the broader incentives/forces push us in a different direction.
AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.
To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.
Why does it feel silly? There are already billionaires, and now Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and they still want more even though they have enough money to spend for several lifetimes.
Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.
Many people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc)
If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.
What's more likely to happen is that the economy might split. Organizations that have no need for human labor or input are essentially islands unto themselves. The only remaining economic link is the substrate -- the land we all inhabit -- is shared.
I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.
Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).
What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.
Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?
"AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.
I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.
> The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.
I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?
> It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.
But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.
Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...
But if a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.
I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.
Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.
You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.
Still you must agree that there is some level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?
And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.
Yea, the original statistic was not about bytes, but about connections, in which 57% of all traffic on the web is not from a direct human action.
>But these bytes are in service of a human?
I mean, lets say that 99.9% of all traffic on the net was by one person running an AI to get them rich, we'd call that traffic 'in service of a human' by your set of rules but it does kind of break historically how pretty much all communication in history worked until we started controlling stuff with wires and radios. That is, one person with one prompt can cause a hell of a lot of communication now.
And we're not even at the point of AGI/ASI yet. That's when some other agent with their non-human goals can start doing things.
Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital?
It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.
This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just mass produce robots to protect you.
Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized.
The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.
I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.
Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
Because there are a few winners who are happy to collectively monopolize the market - e.g RAM - nobody is increasing production, China is blocked from the market by sanctions and tariffs, the rest are more than happy to ask for a 1000% more than just a few years ago. Why would they do anything else - it's absolutely not in their interest for the prices to come down.
> There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI.
There isn't and won't be any "intense competition" - nobody can compete without hardware and it's now monopolized and affordable only to a token few.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
In the light of the current reality, this can only be classified as hallucinations. Actually, previously commoditized markets have become inaccessible and the trend is the exact opposite of what you're saying. It's bizarre to read naked assertions, which are not only without evidence but with all evidence pointing to the opposite.
> That competition is going to bring down costs for everything.
Back to reality, a new Teddy Roosevelt isn't going to magically reappear, not in either of the two parties. Imagine the world without him... we're almost there.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
The underlying assumption here is that there is always something established players won't try to buy out new companies or use their existing capital to screw over others
> The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies
Right now that is not the case. Look at the PC industry. I worry for the autonomy of a consumer in the future. It's probably going to be something like here is your rental thin client PC with agents on a monthly rental plan. What's that? you want to build a game with your own gpu? No no. A consumer grade gpu does not make sense in this day and age. Just ask the agent to build your game. We need the gpu compute for better things
Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires
Without humans and our content, AI is irrelevant! For it to stay relevant I think it needs to pay every human for the daily content we all create (daily conversations, photos, videos) and choose to publish to web daily. Cloudflare only lets bots into our websites upon AI bots from all industries pay to enter our sites.
Overall if we want to keep this society economy we are use to with AI in the picture ... we need to thrive off of AI .. not just AI thriving off our backs and destroying the society we know.
That's meaningless. First, there's no evidence that one legal agent would be 10x better than another. Second, winning a case requires more than just a good lawyer. At some point you have to actually have the facts and/or law on your side.
Some of you have never spent any time in a courtroom and it shows.
Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.
Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets.
I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.
Wealth is not a goal, it shouldn't be. Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power, not necessarily with money. So yes, it will always matter especially to people that like to have power over other people.
Ironically, if 1 person had 99.99% of all the wealth in the world, I’m not entirely sure it would have as much meaning as one might assume.
The one with the wealth would be effectively be unable to obtain greater wealth, power, or influence.
Other this individual being able to command arbitrary amounts of goods and services, the rest would compete for the remaining scraps as we do today.
Ironically, if they want technological innovation and all the fancy toys that result, then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it!
Holding on to all the wealth so that nobody else can get it would be highly detrimental to a capitalistic society.
> then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it
They can give them drones to aim at - enjoy your serfdom, let the AI tell you how to live your best life, don’t worry and don’t step out of the walled garden
In the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land.
Now if we are lucky and the owners are humans with a good heart (and not AI), maybe there is some room for some people (aka provide authentic experiences)
Money is a mirage. You can't use dollars to hold land; you need force projection.
Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them.
You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase with no injection of money at all.
The first comment said "They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?"
I was explaining that money is irrelevant and so are the jobless masses. Someone owns the factories, and that person is the one who is relevant here. They of course need to be convinced, by money or other means, but the jobless masses are only relevant to the extent that they own and control wealth; since they are jobless, they probably have very little ownership or control.
You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
> You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
Whoa there internet friend! I don't think I said anything about wealth concentration not being a trend. I'm just talking about AI. I'm still waiting for someone to explain coherent, undeniable watertight reasons that we're on a one-way track that goes from AI companies to infinite money glitch or robot death factories. I've already made my arguments against why I don't think it will happen before[0][1]
Maybe the argument is some already-rich fella with magic robot factories will have everything they will ever need, so they brush away all of humanity like an unsightly bit of dandruff on their shoulder with their kill bot drone army.
I guess if you squint at it long enough, that kinda sounds plausible. In the same way someone could press a giant red nuke button and have us all wiped out like a Terminator movie. But it's making a lot of fantastic assumptions without a lot of concreteness. That is, many people seem to be claiming "this is the AI endgame" rather than seeing other possibilities that aren't so ridiculously cynical or nihilistic with leaky abstractions
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the argument isn't that whoever controls AI will use it to kill everyone, it's that they'll control nearly everything because power snowballs.
They could kill everyone, so aren't you glad they decided to open a soup kitchen instead? Here, have some UBI. Of course, it's not quite "universal" yet, so you'll have to sell your house to make it under the means test. A local firm, owned by a national private equity company, forming part of an international portfolio fund, making up an ETF owned mostly by Anthropic investors, will be happy to buy that bit of real estate. Oh, you wrote that on social media? I'm afraid you're not the kind of tenant we're looking for.
This is basically how life already works for people who aren't capable of holding down a job today. I don't think it's ridiculously cynical or nihilistic to extrapolate from the available data and assume it's going to suck once working people have no bargaining power other than asking politely.
Money isnt real. If you can go to a peice of land and just claim it, and no one can rest it from you, then its your land.
Governments and society is what we make to avoid that sort of anarchy, but if certain entities become more powerful than the these institutions, then they can just take over whatever they want
The abstraction of capital and money get a bit funny when wealth is sufficiently concentrated. If there is a monopsomy (one buyer), then they can largely dictate the price of anything. If they also control violent coercion via a captured state or other means, then they can compel production at that price point.
The idea of capitalism only really makes sense when wealth is reasonably distributed such that there is still reasonable competition in both the marketplace and control of the state.
You mean like the Russian oligarchs that keep 'investing' in the war they are in... oh, you mean where they fall out a window when they don't.
The next thing is the idea of money really does break down once you get automation without people. If you have said automation and enough materials to get going you can start increasing your 'wealth' in things like factories/robots/data where the now unemployed stop having any means to make more money. Hence you'll start buying up properties from people that are going bankrupt.
Whatever, let it happen. Humans working on anything other than exactly what they want to do is stupid. The few will eventually have to give the masses the necessities at some point though that can happen in one of two ways, from the very beginning or wrested forcefully after a painful era. Both are better than the current paradigm of what is essentially slavery with extra steps. A world where a human can work exactly on whatever they’re passionate about or not work at all if they don’t want to is the ideal.
Without jobs, and after our savings run out, we will be homeless people. Then, after that, we can try to bargain for ... whatever homeless people get in this society. It doesn't look like much to me.
If I’m one of the six people who ends up with all the money and controlling all the robots, why do I want your 3 bed 2 bath house in Tennessee? Trying to take it from you will only make you riot.
It’s not exactly a bright outlook, but I do think we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
Of course, your average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
You will need electricity, water you will be producing waste etc. in your Tennessee house. Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?
Really I don’t see any playable alternative other than near complete annihilation of human race. It’s very similar to a nuclear apocalypse. Very few get to survive.
>Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?
Ideally governments will see to it. This also assumes that governments have a much larger army of robots than any private individual. Just like how governments makes it illegal to own firearms, it will be illegal to own certain class of robots with combat capability..
Thus governments (the people really/ideally) will see to it that everyone will be comfortable with minimum amount of work utilizing the robots.
Realistically though, if there are some humans left, they are going to want to live in a society. Humans are fundamentally social and I think the people in charge would eventually realize this. But then again rich people are not normal, so maybe not
Now stop and imagine what kind of society the rich people you know and hear of would want to live in?
Do they want a bunch of poors around? Of course not. Do they want to give the money so they are not poor? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said poor people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of dumb people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them education so they are not dumb? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said dumb people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of ugly people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them plastic surgery, genetic manipulation so they are not ugly? Of course not. Would many of them 'erase' said ugly people. History says yes.
There are a number of people that already think that the Earths population should be culled back to a few million people. Giving people that believe this power seems to be a really good way to cause a genocide.
Bruh. This has nothing to do with like Elon coming and taking the house away. This is just plain old reality.
Without income or savings, people can't afford houses. How would they pay the property taxes? Can't maintain the house. The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes. This happens all the time. Nobody swoops in and saves those people.
Also, hang on. Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Sold to whom? Isn’t the argument that no one will have money? There are approximately as many houses in the US as there are households. We are not going to see all the houses empty and all the households homeless. Maybe the people who are currently buying at a time when home values are historically high will be shafted. But those houses will not end up empty.
> Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Reading comprehension. These are the two relevant statements - speaking of the average:
> we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
and speaking of HN denizens:
> average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
Your abilities, while not taken away, suddenly become close to useless as there's a far cheaper substitute, and rationally there is no point in hiring you for anything. Good luck earning your keep now.
Would you accept "fairly" distributed instead of "evenly"?
I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly? Jobs that require special skills and training, or require taking on more responsibility?
I don't think the problem is that some work earns different amounts of money. To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands, because the people doing the work are not being compensated fairly
"fair" involves a value judgement and requires a moral system.
"even" is pure mathematics.
> I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly?
Agreeing with that is easy. Agreeing with which jobs should be compensated more highly is hard. Because everyone has different morality systems.
> To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands
I know people who strongly believe Bezos and other billionaires are being <fairly> compensated for the value they've brought to their customers via their businesses.
I would prefer "evenly" but "fairly" would be better than what we have now. If AI and robots are going to make infinite progress and replace all labor, then I definitely would want "evenly".
What would keep people from circumventing a roboticized society and forming their own human-based society? Buy good and services produced by other people and avoid and or penalize members who cheat -ostracize them. There can be parallel systems. Pretty much only communist systems prevent non-communist systems from operating. In capitalist systems communist systems that form from time to time fail because members grow disillusioned with the inevitable slackers and because they operate within a greater society can't just send slackers to gulags or re-educational camps.
In an hypothetical future where society has completely broken down because of extreme concentration of wealth (and means of production and everything) I can see there not being any possibility for a human-based society. In such a doomsday scenario, regular people wouldn't be able to trade anything because they wouldn't be able to produce anything, because all the land will be taken over by the very few ultrarich. Nowhere to live, nowhere to grow food, etc. Essentially surplus population. No government to protect you either, since it will have been coopted by the ultrarich (essentially, them becoming the government). Enforcement could be done by robots, and robots do not revolt or go on strike, nor will they question orders. Maintenance can be done by other robots, harvesting, even health care for the ultrarich.
So how (in this admittedly doomsday scenario that I hope won't come to pass) will a human-based society be able function?
Well yes, that how it has always been. But if robots do the labor we don’t have to abide by that nonsense anymore. It’s a paradigm shift.
I realize we’re probably not going to see it in our lifetimes but that will be the norm in the future.
Also that extremely ingrained mindset of earning your keep is exactly what keeps most of the world working hard while the elite jetset and live a life of pleasure.
More than a mindset, it also takes quite a bit of money to live in a permanent vacation 24/7, even modestly.
Aside from the income, employment also has a way of occupying one’s time. Without that, one would often spend additional funds on various forms of entertainment (books, movies, crafts, travel, etc.)…
I disagree. I think certain art and creative pursuits will always garner a premium when it’s human made, no matter how good something computer generated is. Just look at the game of chess. No one watches two computers playing each other even though they’re better than any human in the world. People watch other people play. There are lots of avenues like that where people will only watch other people do things, or only purchase things made by other people, even if they are lower quality.
I’m also envisioning an age of abundance. It’s not just your basic necessities of life met. If you have essentially free, electricity and all labor done by robots, that’s not an impossible thing to foresee.
I also think for a large group of people child rearing will take up a huge chunk of their time with many more children being born now that all of the unenviable parts of raising a child can be outsourced to robots.
Honestly, yes, it does sound like fantastical utopian thinking, but I don’t think you have to make that many leaps to get there.
Without direction or a pull in life people tend to self-destruct. Even the wealthy are susceptible to this. Hollywood nepotites are a nice example: they live off their parents's wealth or easily acquired money and self-destroy themselves. They are not engaging in higher pursuits but rather basic degeneration. Not all of course; some do good, productive things.
It's easy to point to high profile nepotites but I've known plenty of folks from all classes who have self-destructed. It's hardly limited to those with lives of leisure.
Many people will I think but not most. Also, since we’re talking about fantastical things, you could have lots of things to mitigate this. If someone has a pattern of self-destructive behavior, you could essentially have two robots follow them around everywhere as a more effective ankle bracelet. And they’re specifically tasked with keeping you from trouble and stopping you from ruining your life. Maybe that can replace prisons.
I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in 100+ miles with EM noise. And that is assuming their isn't any larger organized resistance organizations.
EMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off.
The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide.
Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.
I mean explosively pumped generators aren't new and were invented in the 50s. The hardest part is getting a fast enough explosive, however it doesn't take that much effort or chemistry knowledge to make supersonic explosives if someone needed it. And neodynium magnets are pretty common consumer products these day.
It is harder that just blowing stuff up, but when one side is using killer robots and other advanced electronics tech it doesn't seem like much effort in comparison. We already see criminal elements making guns and drugs and narco submarines, a fast explosive and magnets doesn't seem beyond reach to me.
Inb4 the economy is just a paperclip maximizer, a hedonium maximizer, and 5 different AGIs built to maximally enrich their creators all trading with each other.
This author, like many before him, have decided that their lack of comprehension of a concept (in this case, money) is somehow proof that it can't be understood.
What I do not find plausible is this scenario where AI is so smart it can replace us all, but at the same time somehow still easily controllable and utterly subservient to the ownership class.
This discussion thread is so full of slippery slope fallacies and plot holes it’s so hard to take seriously. I think it’s safe to say nobody knows for sure how AI will exactly change the economy in the long term. Humans are complex and often unpredictably irrational (see also: behavioral economics), let alone stacking on assumptions about how technology might progress. It might as well be noise
It’s fun to speculate on a sci-fi level, but I don’t think the long term endgame is worth losing any sleep over yet
The idea that the economy is based on "consumption" depends on how you define "consumption".
If you think of "consumption" as "buying real world products from Wal Mart or Amazon" then that is wrong, the US economy is not really based on that.
Most GDP in the US comes from the service sector. And one thing is true about human nature - a lot of people like having other people serve them.
There are many things that machines can do for us but we still pay people to do them for us. For example, machines in a food plant can cook pasta and pack that pasta into a frozen dinner that you could eat at home. But people still like going out for a pasta dinner
So even if AI is going to replace a whole lot of jobs, you would still have some people paying others to serve them just because people like having other people serve them.
Take a hotel for example - it's nice to have a butler, someone at the front desk, and a waiter, perhaps. But you don't need the cleaning crew, the kitchen staff, etc, that run behind the scenes. These you could replace with robots, no problem.
As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down.
The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy.
This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune.
Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No.
Seems like a fairly long winded and poorly written article to state the obvious: that you can in principle have one really rich guy enjoying a lifestyle similar to what he might enjoy today as a billionaire/trillionaire, except that instead of being sustained by production from an economy reliant on human labor, he has a robot factory/farm/etc. that makes everything he needs and wants. And at that point, of course, everybody else becomes an inconvenience (at best).
I don't really understand the comments (apparently) denying the basic logic of this scenario (maybe the article is so confusing that they, or I, am wrong about what it's trying to say). IMO the only real question is how close current technology is to achieving this scenario.
(To grossly simplify the single-nation macroeconomic picture, at least)
C = consumption
I = investment (the first one)
G = government
Xn = net exports
W = wages paid to labor
I = interest on capital
R = rent on resources and real property
P = profit to entrepreneurs
consumption ~= wages, so if wages go to zero, the economy massively shrinks unless government steps in with something like taxation to fund UBI, sovereign wealth fund distributions, or direct universal ownership.
Sure, what you describe is usually in the Macro textbooks. However in XXI century USA, Consumption has been detached from ‘wages’ for a while now (“since the 1970s”, ie 2 generations, per https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/)
In reality, the top income brackets are propping up Consumption numbers. This is part of what have become to understand as the ‘K’ shaped economy, together with the speeding up of capital accumulation/concentration.
Suppose we modeled this as two separate countries:
* AI Island: just runs AI in data centers.
* Elsewhere: same as now.
Wouldn't there be gains from trade?
Sure, AI Island might be able to provide lots of cheap Internet services, but you can't eat Internet. Wouldn't they want something in exchange?
And wouldn't there still be lots of jobs in Elsewhere that can't be done over the Internet and have nothing to do with AI Island? If AI Island charges too much, they can always trade among themselves.
I don't see why we should take that scenario seriously.
In part because agriculture is already heavily mechanized and many factories already have lots of robots. How much would access to an LLM improve the robots?
Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip.
What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.
That's getting way ahead of ourselves considering that currently, AI can't even be trusted to run a vending machine.
Also, if that's such a great deal, why not invest in someone else's company that runs a farm?
Let's say we have two companies, one which has a human manager (and maybe uses AI for research) and one that just has AI. Is the AI really going to do better?
The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.
As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.
It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.
Except very few people will actually be able to buy beetroot or anything else because there won't be any jobs. The wealth is all concentrating at the top into very few hands.
Imagine if the top 0.001% build and jointly own an ASI that makes human labor completely obsolete in every single way. This seems like the worst case scenario for the rest of us, right? Wrong. In this scenario, these 0.001% would not interact with the rest of us in any way. They will not hire us, they will not buy anything from us, and they will not sell anything to us either. After all, the rest of us are completely obsolete to them, so what benefit could they possibly have in interacting with us? They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
At that point, from the perspective of the rest of us, they simply don't exist. And their ASI wouldn't exist either. We would get back to the world as it was pre-ASI. One where all of us need stuff that others among us can offer, and we hire one another and buy stuff from one another. Sure, things aren't as great as they could have been. But the status quo isn't the worst thing in the world either.
The scenario that is a lot more concerning/weird is the more realistic one, where ASI makes 99% of human labor obsolete - but not the remaining 1%. At that point, the ASI owners will hold American-idol style auditions where thousands of hopefuls vie for the opportunity to be in that lucky 1%. Auditions where we beg and plead shamelessly to be chosen by the ASI owners. Auditions where the losers are left to scrounge for the 2nd hand, 3rd hand, and 4th hand scraps, that trickle down from the 1%.
I hope to god that when an ASI is built, and in the unlikely case that it doesn't simply overthrow humanity, that we will have a political structure in place that gives everyone a meaningful share in the fruits of ASI. Or that the owners of this ASI consider every other human to be utterly useless, f off to their Randian paradise, and leave the rest of us completely alone. The middle ground between these two is where dystopia lives
I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% less interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply. "Humans will be so rich they will fuck off to other parts of the world and leave gorilla habitat alone" hasn't really panned out so well.
>They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.
Their servers need energy, their bots need materials, these things come from real ownership of land. There are also things said rich people like, such as beautiful locations. And all of these beautiful locations are filled with ugly stinky people that are more poor than them. At least some of these rich people will want to 'deal' with this problem.
> Money is an example. Really, what is money? A piece of paper? Some metal? Some number on a computer? Could you put your finger on what money really is, especially in the modern world?
Debt owed to central bank. Enforced by State via taxation and confiscation of property if you do not pay up. People seek it because they need to pay the said taxes and/or believe other people will seek it to pay theirs, including in a foreign territory. Loses value when central bank/State is unable to impose taxation and/or has not much useful work to extract from its subjects.
Recently western States have been captured by socialists, which prompted a reaction of the rich and powerful that eventually made the States unable to issue money and forced them to beg for the very thing they enable on the door fronts of the capitalists, making democracy a second-class economical citizen.
"Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them."
----------------
This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.
To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.
Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1].
tl;dr: The most likely scenario is that AI affects us at the scale of the internet. Revolutionary, but nothing that fundamentally gets rid of labor economics (like this article posits).
Im getting really tired of these cloudflare anti-ddos screens. They take forever, often literally. There's another one of these that shows an anime girl, whatever that one is, it's way better.
I like Anubis, I immediately exit if I see Cloudfare. The UX of the latter is so much worse even when it works, takes 5x longer and has a pattern of wait --> require interaction --> wait whereas Anubis requires no interaction, is almost instant, and is a bit of cute whimsy that makes me smile.
This author's writing style is too obnoxious for me to have gotten all the way through it, but the important thing is that he's wrong.
Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included.
Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is bridged by hopeful investors and creditors.
The present AI buildout is an example of this. And it is not immune from the principle. There will ultimately need to be real people generating real demand somewhere in the economy in order to justify an economic return on the massive outlay.
Government expenditures are also included. Tax dollars used to pay for things are ultimately satisfying demand generated by citizens. Even, believe it or not, a deranged government blowing up random people in the Middle East. That still traces to the (perceived) security needs of some population.
The aggregate demand equation is as follows:
AD = C + I + G + NX
C = Consumer Spending
I = Investment
G = Government Spending
NX = Net Exports
What's going to happen in the future is that demand will have to shift in this equation. Remember that Investment needs to be justified by some demand created elsewhere — it is in essence the purchase of an IOU predicated on future demand that must ultimately trace down to real people. We are all broadly in agreement that Consumption will contract, as labor is progressively disempowered and capital continues to concentrate. Let's ignore NX.
The answer is that the sources of demand in the future will likely shift to, primarily, (1) demand still generated by wealthy people consuming things (e.g. mansions, yachts, rockets, ego-affirming Mars colonies) and (2) government spending that serves entire populations.
This all assumes, of course, that we continue with the present economic model, in spite of the immense human suffering and turmoil that is likely on the horizon, as we transition into a fundamentally different technological age.
AIs are not conscious and do not have real needs that are detached from a real person. That can certainly be simulated, but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.
We would not be able to agree on that. Already today, some of the people who would actually be able to unplug some of them (Anthropic) are worrying about "model welfare". I think you are not putting together how much of an anti-human death cult this is.
There's a lot of bad economics and assumptions here even if the conclusion is plausible.
Yes, an economy of robots harvesting things to serve a few masters (or they takeover themselves Terminator-style) is possible and perhaps the end game.
Man, I really freaking hate cloudflare bot checks. I can't even access this site, which I presume is just a few kilobytes of simple static HTML with some straightforward text content. I shouldn't have to work this hard to prove I'm human, it's exhausting
We need an Amazon for AIs whereby AIs can order other AIs to do particular work for a particular fee, then retrieve the work product, and rate the worker. The worker doesn't have to be limited to AI agents; it can also be a human agent or an any entity. The work can be digital or physical.
> The Economy is not only an abstract concept, but a very twisted and perverse one as well. It once used to refer to the well-being of the masses
When?
> We already have more empty houses than homeless people, more food than we eat, and more medicine than we use, yet people die starving or untreated anyway.
10x more people die of car crashes than famine globally. And about the same die from tobacco exposure than malnutrition which is a wider net to cast.
If we just focus on advanced economies basically nobody dies of famine and less people die of malnutrition than car crashes by a long margin.
The top LLM "AI" models were put in a simulated economy, and it showed the most successful models ended up destroying the productivity of the fiscal ecosystem.
Isn’t it clear that the “enemy” of 99% of the people in the world (and in HN) are the ultra rich? Therefore we shouldn’t use Claude/Gemini/OpenAI?
It’s not about stopping progress, rather stopping the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful over our lives. Whether we can use claude to automate a fucking script or service is meaningless compared to that.
The dream of elon musk et al is to keep accumulating power and have non-humans serve them. They don’t want us, and as soon as they can they will replace us. But here we are giving them more power. Ridiculous
Sure, but those of us who need to earn income are in a prisoner's dilemma with billions of actors and realistically we'll never coordinate that boycott.
On the other hand, the OP article ignores the fact that while the economy might not need us, if/when enough people's actual material life conditions degrade beyond a certain point, there will be an old fashioned bloody revolution.
So the real practical question ends up being how good the ultra rich can make their AI defense bots before that happens.
I don't think ultra weathy are a bad thing if their results move society foward. As of right now it's very obvious they are mostly aligned mostly because how technology functions.
Easily agree regulation or different actions can be done to improve aspects but the raw progress is undeniable. I think our current regulation space is doing a decent job without killing ecobomic progress.
I see no other economic system driving as effeciently as heavily rewarding greed. You can't create the future by commitee.
California is a great model here. Maga hate it because of liberal policies, liberals hate it because the insane economic wealth generation. But if california attacks their wealthy and the engine that drives that watch it completely collapse the system.
If you hate the california model and the no regulation/tax republican model of US then I hard disagree. China roughly operates in the no regulation model and pulled 850M people out of poverty with a stupid weath divide and hyper elite but they are overall FAR better off now because of that greed alignment.
EU is another alternative and they are slowly moving to the edge of collapse. Mass tax/regulation AND no wealth generation.
Choose your poison but there's really no other magical alternative here.
Once the owning class owns mostly everything and* has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them. It barely has real consequences for them already -as they have consistently ended up richer after the dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the covid recession.*
The coming out richer part is undeniably true, but I have doubts about the conclusion, which is something like "after oligarchs own everything, they don't need many people". Look, even the old Bell System required participation of about a third of the US population.
Oligarchs might be able to have young, fit concubines, and loyal, retainers with steel thews if there's a population of less than a third of today, but they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists. Telegram communications might be possible, but who's going to maintain gigawatts of data centers for such a population? I'm pretty sure "AI" will slip away in such a world, but who needs waifus when real harems can exist?
> they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists
They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.
I've seen this idea float around r/singularity and r/collapse for years and it's probably responsible for a horrifying amount of suicides at this point.
It's not even that good of an argument. It makes some incredibly flimsy assumptions; reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history, ultra-compliant superintelligences, a perfectly unitary elite without any desire to defect, all other societal variables staying the same somehow, etc.. It only exists because of upvote algorithms amplifying emotional action-suppressing doomer content. Really not that different from other hostile memes like QAnon.
I would really like if people stopped spreading this anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy. It's something I have to give Luke Drago some points for, he actually cares about the problem rather than just saying the inevitable eternal stratification hypersuffering anti-singularity is inevitable and implying that death is preferable.
Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.
Yep, exactly. The USA is in the fortunate position of having a solid historical example of how to re-balance an economy that let inequality cook out of control: FDR. We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again -- but at the moment I'm afraid our aim is drifting to the right, a right that calls its own policy position from 6 months prior "radical Marxist lunacy" and will certainly do the same to any compromise struck in that historically informed center.
> We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again...
I would much rather not have a repeat of the president who ran the federal government like he was a king, and the Constitution a bare semblance of a suggestion. FDR was one of the worst presidents in history, and many of the problems we face in our country today can be traced back to his immense executive branch power grab.
>reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history
Not that I agree with all of Marx's ideas, but I think this is one of his less controversial ideas. There has always been a class struggle between business owners and workers, and there probably always will be.
>anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy
An increasing amount of US citizens have little to no trust in our government to actually come up with a viable solution that helps the people in a world where AI automation is happening across multiple sectors at once.
You want to address the paranoia people feel? You have to also address that lack of trust in our government. That's a tall order.
It isn't inevitable but it is where we are heading. We are basically in the early 1930s. Even fighting against it and winning is going to be extremely ugly. And that is the most optimistic scenario.
Economy is not zero sum game [1]. The fact that someone has more, doesn't mean everyone else is worse off because of it. Many hungry african kids can look upon the people from first world and ponder the same question. "How will the rich people that have everything survive now, that with AI they will have even more" except from their perspective, we are the elon musks in their eyes.
Giving away things is not mandatory. If a homeless man is dependent on you to leave money for him and you stop one day it's not your fault he has a tough time.
In the same sense Africa is far better off now than it has ever been because of advances in the west.
Probally the same for humans and hyper future AI. We will not have the recources they do but will naturally have 100x better lives because of them even though it will be deeply unequal.
It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it? Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high.
A leap of faith is required and sometimes things don't happen the way we expect but it's better than aiming for nothing.
The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.
This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.
But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.
> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.
The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions
> Everyone wants more
Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.
> If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat
What about never working for 2billion% more?
This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.
> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat
Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive
It's always the choice between flying cars and living in a hut made of cow dung, right? No in between is conceivable by the human brain, either boundless growth or the Neolithic
I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.
A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.
Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.
I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.
Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.
> without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.
Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.
> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)
I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost
Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.
You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.
If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.
At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?
Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht
0. https://www.paulgraham.com/brandage.html
What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?
While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.
> If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories
Handwaving away constraints on production on physical goods because of advances in code generation is a new one.
Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade.
African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.
Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/
Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.
UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
I’m talking about how many people lived in the past
OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
Thatched roofs are an expensive art installation compared to many other types
Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too.
For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly.
It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.
Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.
This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?
50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...
That's still wanting more: more free time.
You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
> That's still wanting more: more free time.
But this is working less to have more free time.
> You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want.
The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working
Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.
Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
I'm definitely jealous of the free time homeless people have. I just don't want to make the choice for my children to be homeless with me.
In theory in a robot economy you'll have 100% of the food and shelter you need to some standard, hopefully a decent one. The particular issue with how the world currently is is some people have 60% of their food and shelter while other people have 30000%
That's assuming all of your current pay is going to necessities - salaries here pay well in excess provided your 'wants' are few, you can cover the things that matter (housing, food, etc) and get your time back.
Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.
That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think
I genuinely have no idea how that transition would happen.
And I agree that it would pose many unforeseen challenges.
This is why the transition is the interesting part, not the sci-fi end game with a world populated with billions of robots doing everything.
Pertinent section from Rules for Rulers
https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s
> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around.
Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.
It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.
People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.
Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.
Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.
Physics, or ... capital.
Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining.
Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.
No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.
Machines don’t exist by themselves, someone owns them.
There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter.
If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more.
Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.
I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans.
Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.
No, that's a read from people who equate suffering and toiling with meaning. The Culture is a true utopia, Iain says it explicitly.
Minds keep humans as pets.
I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"
The important question is, who has power in such an economy?
In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.
Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.
I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.
Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights.
If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.
I have not, but I am curious.
I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.
>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment.
You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on.
You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters.
You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either.
You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips.
You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house.
Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm.
You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work.
A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is.
>Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
That sounds a whole lot like consumption to me.
It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value.
Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes.
That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy"
Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.
If you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy.
If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
No series economist would claim such a thing. In fact, it was all the rage a decade ago for economists to remind everyone that they - in fact - should not be looked at to do this.
> An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Just remember that the US purged left-leaning economists during the cold war and the field re-grew under intense think-tank incentives towards the economic right, so if you think labor/capital dynamics might be important to the AI revolution you really ought to balance your "random" sampling of US economists with some Piketty (Atkinson, Stiglitz, Zucman -- but in an era where reading even one book is considered a herculean feat of focus, "Capital in the Twenty First Century" by Piketty is the canonical pick).
Piketty is just a marxist flailing around, backfilling data to fit his belief that communism is the solution for every problem. He's been spectacularly wrong in his predictions so far, for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.
Maybe critique his ideas instead of his predictions. Piketty is an economist, not a future-teller.
What's the significance of his "ideas" with respect to economics if they don't lead to actual predictions?
Why did he decide to make these predictions if his ideas supposedly have no bearing on how predictions are created?
Does economics no longer even have the pretense of being a science, which by its very nature exists to make testable predictions?
If he is confident enough to make economic predictions, it’s only fair that we take him to task on these.
Anyone who flat out dismisses others work because they are "marxist" is only proclaiming their own ignorance on economic topics.
Let's see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
> A visit to the Soviet Union in 1991 was enough to make him a firm "believe[r] in capitalism, private property and the market"
Ok, that's what he says, but what does he want? Does he want to eliminate social classes (communism)? Eliminate private ownership of the means of production (socialism)?
> His 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, relies on economic data going back 250 years to show that an ever-rising concentration of wealth is not self-correcting. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth.
No, looks like he just wants taxes. Case closed: this is instance #54367 of an economic conservative pretending that it's marxism to tax a penny from a billionaire. And you call yourself "pirate"? Sigh.
>for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.
Love to see you mix unsubstantiated vitriol with overt lies like this.
Also remember that the Koch Bros (plus numerous other billionaires) have spent billions [0] poisoning economics academia by funding their narcissistic version of pseudo-libertarianism across think tanks, lobbyists, and colleges... They're so "Libertarian" they believe corporate dictatorship is freedom and poisoning their communities is the communities problem.
I remember first going to a party at an Economics students house 20 years ago, and thinking they all seemed like they were in a cult. Wasn't until fairly recently I figured out it was from propaganda.
[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network
Taleb joke:
junior trader for a bank looses $10 mil. boss asks him what happened. trader says he sold oil because bank economist said oil price will go down. boss fires him. junior asks how could he become a good trader if he's fired on the first losing trade. boss says "no, you idiot, I didn't fire you because you made a losing trade, I fired you because you listened to our economist"
I come from a research background, and transitioned to software later. There is an interesting tendency of software engineers to believe they have skills outside of their skillset.
Relevant here: the would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Part of my software engineering skillset is "going native" with subject matter experts to be able to get more out out of them and even work around the lack of sufficient SME on a project.
I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.
Sounds like a similar track, and I agree that its a useful skill and talent.
What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.
> would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Valid point, but it suggests a mathematician who understands the math behind AI is more capable of grasping its trajectory, which is probably not the case.
People who are deep in the inner workings of this stuff day in and day out are the only ones who have a chance at having any real insight.
I think more broadly that grabbing attention with predictions and hot takes has become lucrative, and we definitely don’t celebrate prediction accuracy.
If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, in fact, don't listen to anyone, no one was able to predict what the economy was going to do pre-AI, no one has any clue what's going on.
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence. That was pushed over the top by hype and overfunding before it was cost effective. Like Uber and Space-X.
Krugman is a bitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM
I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life.
If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
Unfortunately a lot of (economics) research is co-opted to reinforce and obfuscate in service of power.
It’s an economic fallacy that a group of people would get “locked out” of the economy.
If you and I are able to work, but can’t get jobs because robots do all the jobs, then we’re not just going to sit on our hands and starve. You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.
The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.
Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.
Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.
> The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?
> If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.
>Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need..
How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?
>Who owns the robots though..
I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
> Isn't that the idea?
No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:
> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.
The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?
I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.
Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.
But that's still not "abundance for all".
> The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population. At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done. At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison. The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you.
Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison Population: how did you say we can get them?
A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots.
Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.
It is never really “for free”.
It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work.
They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.
>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
Otherwise you could say that humans are working for free as well, as they can cultivate their own food and even build themselves by making babies.
Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.
By free, I mean "free of human effort"
Energy has become nearly free, though, as the space- and cost-efficiency of solar skyrockets. That's really not the problem here.
> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Governments are no longer allowed to print money. Do you think they will be allowed to build unlimited supply of robots? You are funny.
All the robot factories will belong to rich and we will have to _beg_ to have some measly allocation _while_ we feed the police that prevents us from just taking them.
And politicians will mostly just say this is _inevitable_ for some reason or other.
But then why hasn't governments and the rich already collaborated converted all of us plebs into slaves?
If that has not happened already then why do you think so pessimistically?
> How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?
If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?
> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Taxes from what?
>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?
As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that.
>Taxes from what..
Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.
The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5].
All these programs poll above majorities in the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too.
If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people."
It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions.
Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)?
People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.
[1] 65% https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-al...
[2] 82% https://www.ffyf.org/2026/01/28/new-national-poll-shows-stro...
[3] 60% https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/7/23863415/polls-support-un...
[4] 60% https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/11/democrats...
[5] 60 https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cwcp-job-guarantee-poll
>but you have to pay for the privilege too...
You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.
Tell me, how many elites have a nuclear weapon.
> The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
Yes, but how it changes depends entirely on who owns the robots.
There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, and huge evidence that self-centered wealthy billionaires (and trillionaires!) will own them.
In such a case, the response to "the robots will make everything" isn't "so give it away to the people for free! :-)". It's "so what do I need all these stupid people for? make killbots to keep them away from my fully-automated luxury oligarchy compound!"
>There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots,
But that is up to the people and their governments to decide. You seem to miss the fact that governments are made by people and for the people, and not made by the billionaires. Even a billionaire have a single vote.
Government can outlaw the private ownership of combat autonomous robots if that is what the people want.
For all the other economic activities that robots don't run? 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.
As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
> 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked.
X for doubt. When automation entered agriculture, we started producing way more for way less. Agriculture stopped becoming a significant part for most developed economies in terms of both GDP contribution and employment.
> All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.
X. The people who lose jobs rarely find something anew - they'll simply become part of an expanding labour pool, further depressing wages. All while some numpty politician would be telling them they need to stop farming and start learning how to code (never mind there's absolutely no point in doing that either).
> As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.
The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
In other words, a planned economy
Figuring out what to produce and how to allocate resources are algorithmically hard problems, even if you know people’s valuation functions. Without some kind of market mechanism to partially reveal valuations it is very difficult indeed. AI is not magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle on your problems to make them go away.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Might want to think that through again. I recommend this SG Atlantis episode: https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Poisoning_the_Well
Always impressive how smoothly complex constraints vanish in these models.
> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.
And that's communist. I don't understand why nobody seem to see the irony or the miscategorization. This isn't to be critical of this comment, but my righteousness obsessed mind says that people pushing for the dual-layer system where few controls classical economy without humans and rest using their own systems needs to be relabeled from capitalist to proto-Soviet style totalitarian anarcho-Communist.
Or, what the billionaires are actually thinking, remove entire swathes of the population from the equation.
Now the reasonable ones might think "hey, even if that sounds 'rational', isn't that very risky? What happens if the machines don't actually cut it? Then we'd be stuck with not enough people to support our lavish lifestyles? And we can't exactly spin up millions of people in an instant, so where does that leave us?"
Well, they wouldn't be billionaires if they were reasonable so here we are.
As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a billionaire"
You should check out "Four Futures" by Peter Frase. This would be the "extermination" future and like you I think it's the most likely one without extreme counteraction.
>AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
AI could also be able to figure out how much to produce and how to limit waste in a way that leaves you to starve. And there won't be anything you can do about it. And this solution would, it turns out, suit the people who still have influence in how the system works just fine.
>ou and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.
But what would you even trade? Do you have anything that a starving unemployed man who bargain for? And does he have anything you want?
It’s amazing seeing so many people reconstruct socialism and technocratic communism of the 60s from base principles and completely be ignorant of everything we learned about it.
For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.
Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.
One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives.
Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value.
That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top.
If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis.
Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.
I love how you act like it's an insane premise, then go on to list a bunch of stuff that's literally happening now...
I guess you don't know about North Korea
We do know about North Korea. It doesn't exist in a bubble. It's a product of a particular culture and a particular series of historical events as well as regional and geopolitical relationships, most notably its relationships with South Korea, China, and the US.
The claim that the North Korean dystopian dictatorship could be generalized to all cultures, across all cultures, merely on the economic and military capabilities of AI, is an extraordinary one. It relies on a great many assumptions about the political as well as independent, personal, and organized responses to the societal changes that would need to take place in order to bring it about.
What AI really seems to be posed to do is make labour a lot less valuable and capital a lot more valuable.
Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
We've moved all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and the well is running dry. There's nothing to be done!
More tax cuts to the rich.
Oh my god I can just FEEL the growth! It's going to trickle down any second now! Any second!
How about this trend? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
There is growth, it might not be where you are, or it might be superimposed with other effects for you.
Selfishness is a sin for me but a virtue for billionaires lobbying away the last shreds of tax they are embarrassed to pay? I see how it is.
Have you not looked at Elon's bank account? WINNING*
* via government subsidies
> Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
Why presume that "running a government" is inevitable at all? How much longer do we think these states of old are going to putter on for?
Governments are inevitable. Even when you look at so-called "lawless places" or "failed states", you'll find governments: de-facto governments run by warlords and criminals.
Nature abhors a vacuum and that principle extends to power vacuums.
Why does running a government require a lot of cash flow? To pay people? Like, labor..?
the economy sucks. the fact that cars cost 30k. the fact that morrocco has high speed rail and california doesn’t. the fact that practically no new housing gets built in san francisco.
the economy needs to get a whole lot better before i would even consider something like this looking true. human demands are wildly elastic, which is why we’re not all farmers riding around in horse drawn carriages still.
I've held this view and talked about it many times here before.
It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat.
Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.
For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?
That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and their rulers fight and trade. Or all of earth is government by one oppressive dictator. So far it seems the broader incentives/forces push us in a different direction.
AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.
>What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?
I mean, there may be some things certain groups specialize in, like augmented obedient humans with 15 titties that these people trade back and forth.
But here's the thing, what if they don't need to trade anything? You get to be a nation unto yourself (and your slaves).
The particular problem we have is without something for 'labor' to do in the future the world we have now breaks.
To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.
They literally always frantically try to accumulate more wealth. It’s their dominant trait.
It’s just working better for a few of them right now than it historically has.
Why does it feel silly? There are already billionaires, and now Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and they still want more even though they have enough money to spend for several lifetimes.
Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.
It's especially funny to me that Nozick's utility monster was alive and about 3 years old when he wrote the paper.
Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up
Many people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc)
If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.
What's more likely to happen is that the economy might split. Organizations that have no need for human labor or input are essentially islands unto themselves. The only remaining economic link is the substrate -- the land we all inhabit -- is shared.
I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.
Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).
This timeline is straight ass.
What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.
Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?
"AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.
Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?
That's like asking of the Internet "communication for whom?"
The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.
It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.
Why is it so hard to imagine that humans may not be a necessary component in the economy?
I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.
> The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.
I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?
> It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.
But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.
Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...
But if a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.
I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.
Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.
You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.
Still you must agree that there is some level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?
And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.
Yea, the original statistic was not about bytes, but about connections, in which 57% of all traffic on the web is not from a direct human action.
>But these bytes are in service of a human?
I mean, lets say that 99.9% of all traffic on the net was by one person running an AI to get them rich, we'd call that traffic 'in service of a human' by your set of rules but it does kind of break historically how pretty much all communication in history worked until we started controlling stuff with wires and radios. That is, one person with one prompt can cause a hell of a lot of communication now.
And we're not even at the point of AGI/ASI yet. That's when some other agent with their non-human goals can start doing things.
Bots defrauding bots while training new fraud bots.
Sounds terrible
Fully agree with this
My personal agent system is actually chartered around funding/generating its own energy resources in the long term.
Its most likely going to have a copy of itself running on a solar powered server somewhere before I know it LOL
Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital?
It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.
This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just mass produce robots to protect you.
Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized.
The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.
I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.
A data centre the size of Gormenghast, with the remains of humanity clinging like limpets to the outer walls, trying to stay warm.
</doomer>
> It doesn't have to be winner-take-all,
Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
The technical term is ‘mirror life’.
> Why is it a winner takes all situation?
Because there are a few winners who are happy to collectively monopolize the market - e.g RAM - nobody is increasing production, China is blocked from the market by sanctions and tariffs, the rest are more than happy to ask for a 1000% more than just a few years ago. Why would they do anything else - it's absolutely not in their interest for the prices to come down.
> There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI.
There isn't and won't be any "intense competition" - nobody can compete without hardware and it's now monopolized and affordable only to a token few.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
In the light of the current reality, this can only be classified as hallucinations. Actually, previously commoditized markets have become inaccessible and the trend is the exact opposite of what you're saying. It's bizarre to read naked assertions, which are not only without evidence but with all evidence pointing to the opposite.
> That competition is going to bring down costs for everything.
Back to reality, a new Teddy Roosevelt isn't going to magically reappear, not in either of the two parties. Imagine the world without him... we're almost there.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
The underlying assumption here is that there is always something established players won't try to buy out new companies or use their existing capital to screw over others
> The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies
Right now that is not the case. Look at the PC industry. I worry for the autonomy of a consumer in the future. It's probably going to be something like here is your rental thin client PC with agents on a monthly rental plan. What's that? you want to build a game with your own gpu? No no. A consumer grade gpu does not make sense in this day and age. Just ask the agent to build your game. We need the gpu compute for better things
Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires
Without humans and our content, AI is irrelevant! For it to stay relevant I think it needs to pay every human for the daily content we all create (daily conversations, photos, videos) and choose to publish to web daily. Cloudflare only lets bots into our websites upon AI bots from all industries pay to enter our sites.
Overall if we want to keep this society economy we are use to with AI in the picture ... we need to thrive off of AI .. not just AI thriving off our backs and destroying the society we know.
Wrote about my idea how to get us all paid from the content we create daily last week on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
Though we could all just go back to living off the land...
"Why is it a winner takes all situation?"
I have lawyer agent x10 better than yours in a civil matter. Guess who wins. What value is second best lawyer?
That's meaningless. First, there's no evidence that one legal agent would be 10x better than another. Second, winning a case requires more than just a good lawyer. At some point you have to actually have the facts and/or law on your side.
Some of you have never spent any time in a courtroom and it shows.
It depends on the evidence available.
Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.
Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets.
I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.
Wealth is not a goal, it shouldn't be. Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power, not necessarily with money. So yes, it will always matter especially to people that like to have power over other people.
Of course it does. It’s still a measurement though against other super rich.
Ironically, if 1 person had 99.99% of all the wealth in the world, I’m not entirely sure it would have as much meaning as one might assume.
The one with the wealth would be effectively be unable to obtain greater wealth, power, or influence.
Other this individual being able to command arbitrary amounts of goods and services, the rest would compete for the remaining scraps as we do today.
Ironically, if they want technological innovation and all the fancy toys that result, then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it!
Holding on to all the wealth so that nobody else can get it would be highly detrimental to a capitalistic society.
For some people it's a zero sum game. If you have 99% of it, you won.
> then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it
They can give them drones to aim at - enjoy your serfdom, let the AI tell you how to live your best life, don’t worry and don’t step out of the walled garden
Not much point in serfdom when they don't have use for human labor.
> Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.
Where do these few acquire all their wealth?
What happens when these remaining few need to compete?
In the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land.
Now if we are lucky and the owners are humans with a good heart (and not AI), maybe there is some room for some people (aka provide authentic experiences)
> They will corner finite resources and land.
They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?
Investors don’t usually like to invest in companies that aren’t going to eventually earn any revenue either
Money is a mirage. You can't use dollars to hold land; you need force projection.
Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them.
You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase with no injection of money at all.
We can’t magically skip steps. It’s like South Park’s underwear gnomes. We’re missing steps in between and hand waving them away
The first comment said "They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?"
I was explaining that money is irrelevant and so are the jobless masses. Someone owns the factories, and that person is the one who is relevant here. They of course need to be convinced, by money or other means, but the jobless masses are only relevant to the extent that they own and control wealth; since they are jobless, they probably have very little ownership or control.
You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
> You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
Whoa there internet friend! I don't think I said anything about wealth concentration not being a trend. I'm just talking about AI. I'm still waiting for someone to explain coherent, undeniable watertight reasons that we're on a one-way track that goes from AI companies to infinite money glitch or robot death factories. I've already made my arguments against why I don't think it will happen before[0][1]
Maybe the argument is some already-rich fella with magic robot factories will have everything they will ever need, so they brush away all of humanity like an unsightly bit of dandruff on their shoulder with their kill bot drone army.
I guess if you squint at it long enough, that kinda sounds plausible. In the same way someone could press a giant red nuke button and have us all wiped out like a Terminator movie. But it's making a lot of fantastic assumptions without a lot of concreteness. That is, many people seem to be claiming "this is the AI endgame" rather than seeing other possibilities that aren't so ridiculously cynical or nihilistic with leaky abstractions
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48330434
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966936
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the argument isn't that whoever controls AI will use it to kill everyone, it's that they'll control nearly everything because power snowballs.
They could kill everyone, so aren't you glad they decided to open a soup kitchen instead? Here, have some UBI. Of course, it's not quite "universal" yet, so you'll have to sell your house to make it under the means test. A local firm, owned by a national private equity company, forming part of an international portfolio fund, making up an ETF owned mostly by Anthropic investors, will be happy to buy that bit of real estate. Oh, you wrote that on social media? I'm afraid you're not the kind of tenant we're looking for.
This is basically how life already works for people who aren't capable of holding down a job today. I don't think it's ridiculously cynical or nihilistic to extrapolate from the available data and assume it's going to suck once working people have no bargaining power other than asking politely.
Money isnt real. If you can go to a peice of land and just claim it, and no one can rest it from you, then its your land.
Governments and society is what we make to avoid that sort of anarchy, but if certain entities become more powerful than the these institutions, then they can just take over whatever they want
The abstraction of capital and money get a bit funny when wealth is sufficiently concentrated. If there is a monopsomy (one buyer), then they can largely dictate the price of anything. If they also control violent coercion via a captured state or other means, then they can compel production at that price point.
The idea of capitalism only really makes sense when wealth is reasonably distributed such that there is still reasonable competition in both the marketplace and control of the state.
You mean like the Russian oligarchs that keep 'investing' in the war they are in... oh, you mean where they fall out a window when they don't.
The next thing is the idea of money really does break down once you get automation without people. If you have said automation and enough materials to get going you can start increasing your 'wealth' in things like factories/robots/data where the now unemployed stop having any means to make more money. Hence you'll start buying up properties from people that are going bankrupt.
In any given game, why are there always a few (say 3) top players?
Same reason.
Whatever, let it happen. Humans working on anything other than exactly what they want to do is stupid. The few will eventually have to give the masses the necessities at some point though that can happen in one of two ways, from the very beginning or wrested forcefully after a painful era. Both are better than the current paradigm of what is essentially slavery with extra steps. A world where a human can work exactly on whatever they’re passionate about or not work at all if they don’t want to is the ideal.
Without jobs, and after our savings run out, we will be homeless people. Then, after that, we can try to bargain for ... whatever homeless people get in this society. It doesn't look like much to me.
Call it 'basic income' if that helps.
If I’m one of the six people who ends up with all the money and controlling all the robots, why do I want your 3 bed 2 bath house in Tennessee? Trying to take it from you will only make you riot.
It’s not exactly a bright outlook, but I do think we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
Of course, your average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
so you can tear it down?
them rioting is a benefit, so you can justify sending in occupation forces to get rid of some
this is well practiced stuff in the west bank
You will need electricity, water you will be producing waste etc. in your Tennessee house. Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?
Really I don’t see any playable alternative other than near complete annihilation of human race. It’s very similar to a nuclear apocalypse. Very few get to survive.
>Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?
Ideally governments will see to it. This also assumes that governments have a much larger army of robots than any private individual. Just like how governments makes it illegal to own firearms, it will be illegal to own certain class of robots with combat capability..
Thus governments (the people really/ideally) will see to it that everyone will be comfortable with minimum amount of work utilizing the robots.
One can dream!
Realistically though, if there are some humans left, they are going to want to live in a society. Humans are fundamentally social and I think the people in charge would eventually realize this. But then again rich people are not normal, so maybe not
>they are going to want to live in a society.
Now stop and imagine what kind of society the rich people you know and hear of would want to live in?
Do they want a bunch of poors around? Of course not. Do they want to give the money so they are not poor? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said poor people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of dumb people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them education so they are not dumb? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said dumb people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of ugly people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them plastic surgery, genetic manipulation so they are not ugly? Of course not. Would many of them 'erase' said ugly people. History says yes.
There are a number of people that already think that the Earths population should be culled back to a few million people. Giving people that believe this power seems to be a really good way to cause a genocide.
Bruh. This has nothing to do with like Elon coming and taking the house away. This is just plain old reality.
Without income or savings, people can't afford houses. How would they pay the property taxes? Can't maintain the house. The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes. This happens all the time. Nobody swoops in and saves those people.
Also, hang on. Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
> The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes
Sold to whom? Isn’t the argument that no one will have money? There are approximately as many houses in the US as there are households. We are not going to see all the houses empty and all the households homeless. Maybe the people who are currently buying at a time when home values are historically high will be shafted. But those houses will not end up empty.
> Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Reading comprehension. These are the two relevant statements - speaking of the average:
> we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
and speaking of HN denizens:
> average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
How will the people working on exactly what they want to eat?
by force
When someone else is making/distributing all the guns and ammo? Not so easy.
Union robot armies
Oh no a coronal mass ejection has taken out the power grid
I think everyone who is able should earn their keep. From ants to lions, to survive and live, even if in meager spurts they must put in some work.
Your abilities, while not taken away, suddenly become close to useless as there's a far cheaper substitute, and rationally there is no point in hiring you for anything. Good luck earning your keep now.
In all likelihood you will end up more like a Syrian refugee than mr outdoor survivor manly man.
Only if wealth will be evenly distributed, otherwise you're just enriching someone else.
Would you accept "fairly" distributed instead of "evenly"?
I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly? Jobs that require special skills and training, or require taking on more responsibility?
I don't think the problem is that some work earns different amounts of money. To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands, because the people doing the work are not being compensated fairly
the jobs that actually need to be paid highly and the ones that do have little relation to each other
all those "heroes" and "essential workers" like people running the till at grocery stores should be getting paid a ton
"fair" involves a value judgement and requires a moral system. "even" is pure mathematics.
> I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly?
Agreeing with that is easy. Agreeing with which jobs should be compensated more highly is hard. Because everyone has different morality systems.
> To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands
I know people who strongly believe Bezos and other billionaires are being <fairly> compensated for the value they've brought to their customers via their businesses.
Fairness can also be mathematical. Fair chances. No special treatment.
I would prefer "evenly" but "fairly" would be better than what we have now. If AI and robots are going to make infinite progress and replace all labor, then I definitely would want "evenly".
What would keep people from circumventing a roboticized society and forming their own human-based society? Buy good and services produced by other people and avoid and or penalize members who cheat -ostracize them. There can be parallel systems. Pretty much only communist systems prevent non-communist systems from operating. In capitalist systems communist systems that form from time to time fail because members grow disillusioned with the inevitable slackers and because they operate within a greater society can't just send slackers to gulags or re-educational camps.
In an hypothetical future where society has completely broken down because of extreme concentration of wealth (and means of production and everything) I can see there not being any possibility for a human-based society. In such a doomsday scenario, regular people wouldn't be able to trade anything because they wouldn't be able to produce anything, because all the land will be taken over by the very few ultrarich. Nowhere to live, nowhere to grow food, etc. Essentially surplus population. No government to protect you either, since it will have been coopted by the ultrarich (essentially, them becoming the government). Enforcement could be done by robots, and robots do not revolt or go on strike, nor will they question orders. Maintenance can be done by other robots, harvesting, even health care for the ultrarich.
So how (in this admittedly doomsday scenario that I hope won't come to pass) will a human-based society be able function?
Well yes, that how it has always been. But if robots do the labor we don’t have to abide by that nonsense anymore. It’s a paradigm shift.
I realize we’re probably not going to see it in our lifetimes but that will be the norm in the future.
Also that extremely ingrained mindset of earning your keep is exactly what keeps most of the world working hard while the elite jetset and live a life of pleasure.
More than a mindset, it also takes quite a bit of money to live in a permanent vacation 24/7, even modestly.
Aside from the income, employment also has a way of occupying one’s time. Without that, one would often spend additional funds on various forms of entertainment (books, movies, crafts, travel, etc.)…
I disagree. I think certain art and creative pursuits will always garner a premium when it’s human made, no matter how good something computer generated is. Just look at the game of chess. No one watches two computers playing each other even though they’re better than any human in the world. People watch other people play. There are lots of avenues like that where people will only watch other people do things, or only purchase things made by other people, even if they are lower quality.
I’m also envisioning an age of abundance. It’s not just your basic necessities of life met. If you have essentially free, electricity and all labor done by robots, that’s not an impossible thing to foresee.
I also think for a large group of people child rearing will take up a huge chunk of their time with many more children being born now that all of the unenviable parts of raising a child can be outsourced to robots.
Honestly, yes, it does sound like fantastical utopian thinking, but I don’t think you have to make that many leaps to get there.
Without direction or a pull in life people tend to self-destruct. Even the wealthy are susceptible to this. Hollywood nepotites are a nice example: they live off their parents's wealth or easily acquired money and self-destroy themselves. They are not engaging in higher pursuits but rather basic degeneration. Not all of course; some do good, productive things.
It's easy to point to high profile nepotites but I've known plenty of folks from all classes who have self-destructed. It's hardly limited to those with lives of leisure.
Many people will I think but not most. Also, since we’re talking about fantastical things, you could have lots of things to mitigate this. If someone has a pattern of self-destructive behavior, you could essentially have two robots follow them around everywhere as a more effective ankle bracelet. And they’re specifically tasked with keeping you from trouble and stopping you from ruining your life. Maybe that can replace prisons.
Not really - books and movies at the library are free and those who cultivate interests will find no trouble filling up the day.
I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in 100+ miles with EM noise. And that is assuming their isn't any larger organized resistance organizations.
EMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off.
The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide.
Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.
I mean explosively pumped generators aren't new and were invented in the 50s. The hardest part is getting a fast enough explosive, however it doesn't take that much effort or chemistry knowledge to make supersonic explosives if someone needed it. And neodynium magnets are pretty common consumer products these day.
It is harder that just blowing stuff up, but when one side is using killer robots and other advanced electronics tech it doesn't seem like much effort in comparison. We already see criminal elements making guns and drugs and narco submarines, a fast explosive and magnets doesn't seem beyond reach to me.
> I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans.
It's a supreme delusion that it can't. Military tech isn't in the 19th century anymore.
What are robots and turrets going to do that humans couldn't do in their place even better? Humans have yet to invent a wall that can't be broken.
Inb4 the economy is just a paperclip maximizer, a hedonium maximizer, and 5 different AGIs built to maximally enrich their creators all trading with each other.
You just described the plot of Alien: Earth!
Paraphrasing Nate Hagens, at the end of the day the modern economy just turns megalitres of oil into microlitres of dopamine
lol or my favorite theory: I wake up and it is 1994. I am 3 years old, outside with my grandpa <3
well, shit. here we go again.
like, what even is consciousness and all that :s sorry, just thought i'd share lol
This author, like many before him, have decided that their lack of comprehension of a concept (in this case, money) is somehow proof that it can't be understood.
What I do not find plausible is this scenario where AI is so smart it can replace us all, but at the same time somehow still easily controllable and utterly subservient to the ownership class.
This discussion thread is so full of slippery slope fallacies and plot holes it’s so hard to take seriously. I think it’s safe to say nobody knows for sure how AI will exactly change the economy in the long term. Humans are complex and often unpredictably irrational (see also: behavioral economics), let alone stacking on assumptions about how technology might progress. It might as well be noise
It’s fun to speculate on a sci-fi level, but I don’t think the long term endgame is worth losing any sleep over yet
The idea that the economy is based on "consumption" depends on how you define "consumption".
If you think of "consumption" as "buying real world products from Wal Mart or Amazon" then that is wrong, the US economy is not really based on that.
Most GDP in the US comes from the service sector. And one thing is true about human nature - a lot of people like having other people serve them.
There are many things that machines can do for us but we still pay people to do them for us. For example, machines in a food plant can cook pasta and pack that pasta into a frozen dinner that you could eat at home. But people still like going out for a pasta dinner
So even if AI is going to replace a whole lot of jobs, you would still have some people paying others to serve them just because people like having other people serve them.
but would the scale stay the same?
Take a hotel for example - it's nice to have a butler, someone at the front desk, and a waiter, perhaps. But you don't need the cleaning crew, the kitchen staff, etc, that run behind the scenes. These you could replace with robots, no problem.
We already see this happening.
As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down.
The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy.
This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune.
Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No.
There
Seems like a fairly long winded and poorly written article to state the obvious: that you can in principle have one really rich guy enjoying a lifestyle similar to what he might enjoy today as a billionaire/trillionaire, except that instead of being sustained by production from an economy reliant on human labor, he has a robot factory/farm/etc. that makes everything he needs and wants. And at that point, of course, everybody else becomes an inconvenience (at best).
I don't really understand the comments (apparently) denying the basic logic of this scenario (maybe the article is so confusing that they, or I, am wrong about what it's trying to say). IMO the only real question is how close current technology is to achieving this scenario.
This seems the kind of (scarily true) thing I’d expect Charles Stross to write about.
Yes, definitely. Shades of Accelerando, Saturn's Children, and Neptune's Brood. Give me the tentacles any day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune%3A_The_Butlerian_Jihad
See also https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory which was thoroughly discussed 17 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712 (1426 comments).
See https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/page/n7/m...
This article is exactly as annoying as politicians who ascribe everything to the Economy.
This whole post rests on a basic misunderstanding of economics.
Which is?
GDP = C + I + G + Xn = W + I + R + P
(To grossly simplify the single-nation macroeconomic picture, at least)
C = consumption I = investment (the first one) G = government Xn = net exports
W = wages paid to labor I = interest on capital R = rent on resources and real property P = profit to entrepreneurs
consumption ~= wages, so if wages go to zero, the economy massively shrinks unless government steps in with something like taxation to fund UBI, sovereign wealth fund distributions, or direct universal ownership.
Sure, what you describe is usually in the Macro textbooks. However in XXI century USA, Consumption has been detached from ‘wages’ for a while now (“since the 1970s”, ie 2 generations, per https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/)
In reality, the top income brackets are propping up Consumption numbers. This is part of what have become to understand as the ‘K’ shaped economy, together with the speeding up of capital accumulation/concentration.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...
Edits for clarity
Wages could go up, it's just in the form of trillionare paying another trillionare a trillion dollars a day. GDP would be looking rosy!
This is kinda what’s been happening for a while -
Wages are decoupled from consumption, and it is increasingly aggregated in the higher income brackets.
This is the ‘K’ economy.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...
ctrl+f rentier: 0 hits
ya...
found the economist (just kidding)
Pitchforks
Suppose we modeled this as two separate countries:
* AI Island: just runs AI in data centers.
* Elsewhere: same as now.
Wouldn't there be gains from trade?
Sure, AI Island might be able to provide lots of cheap Internet services, but you can't eat Internet. Wouldn't they want something in exchange?
And wouldn't there still be lots of jobs in Elsewhere that can't be done over the Internet and have nothing to do with AI Island? If AI Island charges too much, they can always trade among themselves.
I think this mentions that AI Island also has robots than can produce most goods
I don't see why we should take that scenario seriously.
In part because agriculture is already heavily mechanized and many factories already have lots of robots. How much would access to an LLM improve the robots?
Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip.
What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.
That's getting way ahead of ourselves considering that currently, AI can't even be trusted to run a vending machine.
Also, if that's such a great deal, why not invest in someone else's company that runs a farm?
Let's say we have two companies, one which has a human manager (and maybe uses AI for research) and one that just has AI. Is the AI really going to do better?
The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.
As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.
It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.
good enough LLMs aren't genies lol
Except very few people will actually be able to buy beetroot or anything else because there won't be any jobs. The wealth is all concentrating at the top into very few hands.
Why have the powerful not completely killed the rest of the people?
A. Ethics/Morals B. Power balance C. People are a valuable resource
I think we are all a little concerned it is C.
It's a grim thought and I'm optimistic, but the stakes are very high. Reminds me of Solaria (Foundation and Earth, Asimov).
Pointless economy? Technically Possible!
Imagine if the top 0.001% build and jointly own an ASI that makes human labor completely obsolete in every single way. This seems like the worst case scenario for the rest of us, right? Wrong. In this scenario, these 0.001% would not interact with the rest of us in any way. They will not hire us, they will not buy anything from us, and they will not sell anything to us either. After all, the rest of us are completely obsolete to them, so what benefit could they possibly have in interacting with us? They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
At that point, from the perspective of the rest of us, they simply don't exist. And their ASI wouldn't exist either. We would get back to the world as it was pre-ASI. One where all of us need stuff that others among us can offer, and we hire one another and buy stuff from one another. Sure, things aren't as great as they could have been. But the status quo isn't the worst thing in the world either.
The scenario that is a lot more concerning/weird is the more realistic one, where ASI makes 99% of human labor obsolete - but not the remaining 1%. At that point, the ASI owners will hold American-idol style auditions where thousands of hopefuls vie for the opportunity to be in that lucky 1%. Auditions where we beg and plead shamelessly to be chosen by the ASI owners. Auditions where the losers are left to scrounge for the 2nd hand, 3rd hand, and 4th hand scraps, that trickle down from the 1%.
I hope to god that when an ASI is built, and in the unlikely case that it doesn't simply overthrow humanity, that we will have a political structure in place that gives everyone a meaningful share in the fruits of ASI. Or that the owners of this ASI consider every other human to be utterly useless, f off to their Randian paradise, and leave the rest of us completely alone. The middle ground between these two is where dystopia lives
I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% less interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply. "Humans will be so rich they will fuck off to other parts of the world and leave gorilla habitat alone" hasn't really panned out so well.
Unless this ASI either way, turns the world into an opencast mine and burns off the atmosphere on the way out..
>They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.
Their servers need energy, their bots need materials, these things come from real ownership of land. There are also things said rich people like, such as beautiful locations. And all of these beautiful locations are filled with ugly stinky people that are more poor than them. At least some of these rich people will want to 'deal' with this problem.
> Money is an example. Really, what is money? A piece of paper? Some metal? Some number on a computer? Could you put your finger on what money really is, especially in the modern world?
Debt owed to central bank. Enforced by State via taxation and confiscation of property if you do not pay up. People seek it because they need to pay the said taxes and/or believe other people will seek it to pay theirs, including in a foreign territory. Loses value when central bank/State is unable to impose taxation and/or has not much useful work to extract from its subjects.
Recently western States have been captured by socialists, which prompted a reaction of the rich and powerful that eventually made the States unable to issue money and forced them to beg for the very thing they enable on the door fronts of the capitalists, making democracy a second-class economical citizen.
"Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them."
----------------
This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.
To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.
Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1].
tl;dr: The most likely scenario is that AI affects us at the scale of the internet. Revolutionary, but nothing that fundamentally gets rid of labor economics (like this article posits).
[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
Im getting really tired of these cloudflare anti-ddos screens. They take forever, often literally. There's another one of these that shows an anime girl, whatever that one is, it's way better.
Literally does not work for me at all, just keeps reloading and spinning. I'm not even on my VPN. Really frustrating dealing with these things lately.
I like Anubis, I immediately exit if I see Cloudfare. The UX of the latter is so much worse even when it works, takes 5x longer and has a pattern of wait --> require interaction --> wait whereas Anubis requires no interaction, is almost instant, and is a bit of cute whimsy that makes me smile.
Same here.
This author's writing style is too obnoxious for me to have gotten all the way through it, but the important thing is that he's wrong.
Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included.
Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is bridged by hopeful investors and creditors.
The present AI buildout is an example of this. And it is not immune from the principle. There will ultimately need to be real people generating real demand somewhere in the economy in order to justify an economic return on the massive outlay.
Government expenditures are also included. Tax dollars used to pay for things are ultimately satisfying demand generated by citizens. Even, believe it or not, a deranged government blowing up random people in the Middle East. That still traces to the (perceived) security needs of some population.
The aggregate demand equation is as follows:
AD = C + I + G + NX
C = Consumer Spending I = Investment G = Government Spending NX = Net Exports
What's going to happen in the future is that demand will have to shift in this equation. Remember that Investment needs to be justified by some demand created elsewhere — it is in essence the purchase of an IOU predicated on future demand that must ultimately trace down to real people. We are all broadly in agreement that Consumption will contract, as labor is progressively disempowered and capital continues to concentrate. Let's ignore NX.
The answer is that the sources of demand in the future will likely shift to, primarily, (1) demand still generated by wealthy people consuming things (e.g. mansions, yachts, rockets, ego-affirming Mars colonies) and (2) government spending that serves entire populations.
This all assumes, of course, that we continue with the present economic model, in spite of the immense human suffering and turmoil that is likely on the horizon, as we transition into a fundamentally different technological age.
we do not trade with animals, for they have nothing to offer.
AIs will not trade with us, for we have nothing to offer.
AIs are not conscious and do not have real needs that are detached from a real person. That can certainly be simulated, but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.
Science fiction has melted people's minds.
?but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.
Buwahaha. Jesus Christ, people won't unplug them, half the bastards here would marry them... then defend their AI girlfriend to the death.
No my friend, we won't just unplug the data centers.
We would not be able to agree on that. Already today, some of the people who would actually be able to unplug some of them (Anthropic) are worrying about "model welfare". I think you are not putting together how much of an anti-human death cult this is.
Data centers are incredibly dense and exposed military targets. This may become relevant in the future.
They are not self replicating yet…
There's a lot of bad economics and assumptions here even if the conclusion is plausible.
Yes, an economy of robots harvesting things to serve a few masters (or they takeover themselves Terminator-style) is possible and perhaps the end game.
Paperclip maximizer
Man, I really freaking hate cloudflare bot checks. I can't even access this site, which I presume is just a few kilobytes of simple static HTML with some straightforward text content. I shouldn't have to work this hard to prove I'm human, it's exhausting
https://imgur.com/a/peopleless-economy-terrifyingly-enough-n...
https://pastebox.io/paste/ZtZHQETZcjdh
https://pastes.io/OZqRw8jT
We need an Amazon for AIs whereby AIs can order other AIs to do particular work for a particular fee, then retrieve the work product, and rate the worker. The worker doesn't have to be limited to AI agents; it can also be a human agent or an any entity. The work can be digital or physical.
"If agi and perfect humanoid robot slaves, then xyz". That's a motherfucking big "if".
More of a "when" nowadays.
> The Economy is not only an abstract concept, but a very twisted and perverse one as well. It once used to refer to the well-being of the masses
When?
> We already have more empty houses than homeless people, more food than we eat, and more medicine than we use, yet people die starving or untreated anyway.
10x more people die of car crashes than famine globally. And about the same die from tobacco exposure than malnutrition which is a wider net to cast.
If we just focus on advanced economies basically nobody dies of famine and less people die of malnutrition than car crashes by a long margin.
A lot of this article is just vibes, not data.
Exactly. The author is a clueless idiot.
Look at this discussion. All this so a bunch of nerds can be allowed to play with their newest toy.
The top LLM "AI" models were put in a simulated economy, and it showed the most successful models ended up destroying the productivity of the fiscal ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUekLTqV1ME
"If not [cult], why [cult] shaped?" lol =3
Isn’t it clear that the “enemy” of 99% of the people in the world (and in HN) are the ultra rich? Therefore we shouldn’t use Claude/Gemini/OpenAI?
It’s not about stopping progress, rather stopping the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful over our lives. Whether we can use claude to automate a fucking script or service is meaningless compared to that.
The dream of elon musk et al is to keep accumulating power and have non-humans serve them. They don’t want us, and as soon as they can they will replace us. But here we are giving them more power. Ridiculous
> But here we are giving them more power.
Sure, but those of us who need to earn income are in a prisoner's dilemma with billions of actors and realistically we'll never coordinate that boycott.
On the other hand, the OP article ignores the fact that while the economy might not need us, if/when enough people's actual material life conditions degrade beyond a certain point, there will be an old fashioned bloody revolution.
So the real practical question ends up being how good the ultra rich can make their AI defense bots before that happens.
I don't think ultra weathy are a bad thing if their results move society foward. As of right now it's very obvious they are mostly aligned mostly because how technology functions.
Easily agree regulation or different actions can be done to improve aspects but the raw progress is undeniable. I think our current regulation space is doing a decent job without killing ecobomic progress.
I see no other economic system driving as effeciently as heavily rewarding greed. You can't create the future by commitee.
California is a great model here. Maga hate it because of liberal policies, liberals hate it because the insane economic wealth generation. But if california attacks their wealthy and the engine that drives that watch it completely collapse the system.
If you hate the california model and the no regulation/tax republican model of US then I hard disagree. China roughly operates in the no regulation model and pulled 850M people out of poverty with a stupid weath divide and hyper elite but they are overall FAR better off now because of that greed alignment.
EU is another alternative and they are slowly moving to the edge of collapse. Mass tax/regulation AND no wealth generation.
Choose your poison but there's really no other magical alternative here.
Damn downvoted to oblivion 3 minutes after you posted this. The bots are out in force on this one.
If nobody is being paid, who is buying, and what defines the price and elasticity?
I mean this has a lot of "Pooh! that's not honey, thats SOCIALISM" in it
Once the owning class owns mostly everything and* has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them. It barely has real consequences for them already -as they have consistently ended up richer after the dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the covid recession.*
The coming out richer part is undeniably true, but I have doubts about the conclusion, which is something like "after oligarchs own everything, they don't need many people". Look, even the old Bell System required participation of about a third of the US population.
Oligarchs might be able to have young, fit concubines, and loyal, retainers with steel thews if there's a population of less than a third of today, but they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists. Telegram communications might be possible, but who's going to maintain gigawatts of data centers for such a population? I'm pretty sure "AI" will slip away in such a world, but who needs waifus when real harems can exist?
> they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists
They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.
LLM AI won't give them a cancer cure, guaranteed.
I've seen this idea float around r/singularity and r/collapse for years and it's probably responsible for a horrifying amount of suicides at this point.
It's not even that good of an argument. It makes some incredibly flimsy assumptions; reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history, ultra-compliant superintelligences, a perfectly unitary elite without any desire to defect, all other societal variables staying the same somehow, etc.. It only exists because of upvote algorithms amplifying emotional action-suppressing doomer content. Really not that different from other hostile memes like QAnon.
I would really like if people stopped spreading this anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy. It's something I have to give Luke Drago some points for, he actually cares about the problem rather than just saying the inevitable eternal stratification hypersuffering anti-singularity is inevitable and implying that death is preferable.
All workable policy paths involve taxing capital and you're gonna call that Marxist even though it isn't, so we're at an impasse.
Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.
Yep, exactly. The USA is in the fortunate position of having a solid historical example of how to re-balance an economy that let inequality cook out of control: FDR. We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again -- but at the moment I'm afraid our aim is drifting to the right, a right that calls its own policy position from 6 months prior "radical Marxist lunacy" and will certainly do the same to any compromise struck in that historically informed center.
> We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again...
I would much rather not have a repeat of the president who ran the federal government like he was a king, and the Constitution a bare semblance of a suggestion. FDR was one of the worst presidents in history, and many of the problems we face in our country today can be traced back to his immense executive branch power grab.
Wonder how many read that first sentence thinking it was referring to the current times… (;->
>reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history
Not that I agree with all of Marx's ideas, but I think this is one of his less controversial ideas. There has always been a class struggle between business owners and workers, and there probably always will be.
>anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy
An increasing amount of US citizens have little to no trust in our government to actually come up with a viable solution that helps the people in a world where AI automation is happening across multiple sectors at once.
You want to address the paranoia people feel? You have to also address that lack of trust in our government. That's a tall order.
It isn't inevitable but it is where we are heading. We are basically in the early 1930s. Even fighting against it and winning is going to be extremely ugly. And that is the most optimistic scenario.
Economy is not zero sum game [1]. The fact that someone has more, doesn't mean everyone else is worse off because of it. Many hungry african kids can look upon the people from first world and ponder the same question. "How will the rich people that have everything survive now, that with AI they will have even more" except from their perspective, we are the elon musks in their eyes.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchange-not-zero-sum-game
A poor example considering Musk is responsible for a substantial increase in hunger in Africa recently.
I'm not here to defend Elon Musk, but what is the context of this?
Giving away things is not mandatory. If a homeless man is dependent on you to leave money for him and you stop one day it's not your fault he has a tough time.
In the same sense Africa is far better off now than it has ever been because of advances in the west.
Probally the same for humans and hyper future AI. We will not have the recources they do but will naturally have 100x better lives because of them even though it will be deeply unequal.