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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.)…
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".
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
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
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
Capital pays you for being rich in proportion to how rich you are. Elon can't hide behind my 401k, he doesn't fit. Also: most Americans and most people are far poorer than you and I and get paid even less for being rich than you and I.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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
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.
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.
In all likelihood you will end up more like a Syrian refugee than mr outdoor survivor manly man.
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.)…
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
"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".
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
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
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
In other words, a planned 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.
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.
Always impressive how smoothly complex constraints vanish in these models.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up
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.
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.
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!
> Oh my god I can just FEEL the growth! It's going to trickle down any second now! Any second!
Your 401k/pension’s passive index ETF at Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab definitely went up in value.
There’s your trickle down.
Capital pays you for being rich in proportion to how rich you are. Elon can't hide behind my 401k, he doesn't fit. Also: most Americans and most people are far poorer than you and I and get paid even less for being rich than you and I.
wow, pennies on the dollar and yet there’s a trillionaire
> wow, pennies on the dollar and yet there’s a trillionaire
You want whole dollars?
Says who? You?
Perhaps you should inform your elected government representatives.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
See https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/page/n7/m...
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
Unless this ASI either way, turns the world into an opencast mine and burns off the atmosphere on the way out..
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.
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).
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.
ctrl+f rentier: 0 hits
ya...
found the economist (just kidding)
Look at this discussion. All this so a bunch of nerds can be allowed to play with their newest toy.
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
"If agi and perfect humanoid robot slaves, then xyz". That's a motherfucking big "if".
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?
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.
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
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.
Paperclip maximizer
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.