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dominicrose 5 hours ago [-]
It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it?
Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high.
A leap of faith is required and sometimes things don't happen the way we expect but it's better than aiming for nothing.
lqet 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, predicting the future was never possible. In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak. Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children and live life through the great plague, through middle ages in which most of the population expected the apocalypse to be just around the corner, the 30 years war with up to 70% of the population dead in some areas, two world wars, a time in which nuclear annihilation of mankind seemed just one false push of a button away, and a time when large parts of Europe were covered in radioactive substances following the Chernobyl disaster.
End times are nothing new, it's the historic default mode.
mothballed 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of those people were able to do it without debt which made it far less precarious. I have equally pessimistic view of the future so I built my house one piece of wood at a time with cash. I bought a piece of shit car with cash. I've never used debt, I just got all the things I have by buying shit cars and shit land and slowly slowly making things better until I have nice things.
For much of the youth, this is impossible. The permitting and regulatory process for houses is hostile to slow and DIY building so even if you can get cheap land near jobs (you can) you can't do it without predicting 30 years of mortgage payments. The pandemic monetary policy (more recently) and cash-for-clunkers(longer ago) trashed the used car markets. Increased regulation, licensing, insurance requirements and liability made childcare far less affordable. Also in the old days "neglect" was stuff like actually starving your kids to death so if you were broke you could work or do domestic stuff to save money and leave them home or to run around outside without Karen having them snatched by CPS.
Annihilation isn't so worrying, it's the surviving that's scary.
bluGill 1 hours ago [-]
Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first).
Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.
datadrivenangel 24 minutes ago [-]
Modern civilization is ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests away from major disaster. If food costs 20x what it used to, a good number of people will starve or die in the political turbulence that will follow...
zoomerwaffen 12 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like France circa 1790.
doctorwho42 46 minutes ago [-]
Umm, have you ever heard of pickling? Root cellars? Canning?
I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation.
They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.
decimalenough 27 minutes ago [-]
Correct, they were mostly two bad harvests away from starvation. 240,000 people starved to death in Sweden because 1867 was cold and 1868 was dry.
> The Great Famine, which lasted from 1770 until 1771, killed about one tenth of Czech lands' population, or 250,000 inhabitants, and radicalised countrysides leading to peasant uprisings.[135]
Everything about being a male parent was far less precarious, and being a female parent was less precarious after childbirth. There was literally basically no liability if the children died, and not only that, the people around you would likely understand and sympathize with you. You could just make a best effort and if you failed, chalk it up to bad luck and try again. And if you died of starvation, welp your responsibilities in life have ended. That's a lot more inviting to having children than the current status quo.
Society today still doesn't really do dick to help parents but not only that they've built unprecedented apparatus around jailing, ridiculing, condemning, and harassing parents for any perceived weaknesses in their strategy including failing to foresee their financial situation decades into the future.
mothballed 1 hours ago [-]
Most people worry more about what they'll do if they survive than what they'll do if they die to the point I don't think "what if we all die" even barely registers in the calculation of whether to have kids. IF you all starve it's all a moot point. In even an African village everyone who wanted a house could just build it on the copious land available with whatever materials you could find-- I would assert having a home is more precarious now than even medieval or even pre-historic times as the regulations and law will banish you to the street today if you just build whatever you can afford to build as was done in practically all times before.
I don't spend much time worrying about what I'll do for my kids if the nuclear apocalypse happens. I would still have kids if it was 90% chance of the apocolypse, whereas I'd probably not have kids if there were a 30% chance I make just enough to survive but not so much I can pay child support and I sit in a jail cell while everyone around me does nothing but rags on me for being a deadbeat and failure of a father.
Note: Also, except for the first few years, having kids made your situation less rather than more precarious in the agrarian age
trevithick 35 minutes ago [-]
I'm glad you addressed that your house-building strategy isn't feasible almost anywhere. There was an interesting article posted to HN on this topic a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470400
trolleski 3 hours ago [-]
They make it impossible to predict on purpose. The more the population is disoriented the better for the ultra rich, paradoxically it maximizes control. It is a hostile act of course, but as always they're at war with you but you are not at war with them. Choose offline communities, organize, organize, organize. Peacefully, constructively, remember a coordinated general strike is much more dangerous to them than your prison sentence for throwing a brick at a cop.
malfist 1 hours ago [-]
Who is "they" in your story?
doctorwho42 55 minutes ago [-]
Probably referring to those with vast amounts of power and wealth at their disposal.
There isn't some vast conspiracy. But generally it takes a certain kind of person to crave that type of wealth and power. So they tend to all pull in the same direction to keep and build upon said wealth/power. Thus can be viewed as collectively working towards the same nefarious state of things.
trolleski 46 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but sometimes they actually cooperate and coordinate, like we saw in the Epstein files.
And the unpredictability actually has a name and it is "flooding the zone".
trolleski 51 minutes ago [-]
I stated that in the post. :)
chrsw 2 hours ago [-]
There are enough people in the same boat that I would think the future would tend to support families, maybe with a bit of struggle, above all else. No matter how good computers get at devaluing labor or how expensive housing gets, kids still need to eat, learn and grow.
abyssin 24 minutes ago [-]
Seeing the number of poor people in the world, I don't understand what makes you believe you couldn't be one of them. Their kids also need to eat, learn and grow.
everyday7732 2 hours ago [-]
A need does not get filled simply because it exists.
If society is no longer necessary and participating within the economy then society can't provide a safety net for kids.
It's like walking in the desert assuming you will reach water soon because you are really thirsty. Nature doesn't care about human needs and will allow you to die of thirst.
generic92034 1 hours ago [-]
But does human nature allow one member of the caravan having (a lot of) water, while everyone else goes thirsty?
doctorwho42 51 minutes ago [-]
It does when you abstract it to our current situation.
It's like having a caravan in which every oasis you pass you only get a miniscule amount of water to refill.
While another caravan of one, that you never see or interact with directly gets to gorge on the oasis... While simultaneously filling up extra barrels of its water to bring back home.
You don't know where this caravan of one is based nor do you ever see them... But everytime you go by the oasis it is noticeably worse for wear.
monerochan 2 hours ago [-]
Just because there is a need does not mean it will be fufilled
otikik 2 hours ago [-]
Well, imagine being able to actually predict the future. It would suck. There would always be an optimal choice all of the time. You would be a slave to your prescience.
The only way free will is possible is that we are oblivious to the future.
Good luck with your choices, and your life!
doctorwho42 49 minutes ago [-]
Sooooo...
We are doomed because we can predict the sun will rise tomorrow?
We are doomed because we can predict the weather 7-10 days out with reasonable accuracy?
We are doomed because we can predict the climate change based on models?
We are doomed because with our knowledge of physics we can predict the outcome of many events?
dainank 2 hours ago [-]
Dune Messiah in a nutshell.
otikik 1 hours ago [-]
Yes. And "Arrival", as well.
monerochan 2 hours ago [-]
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moffkalast 4 hours ago [-]
That's the neat part, you don't. At least as far as the younger generations is concerned there is no future for us, even if you don't include climate change. Laying flat / quiet quitting, etc. movements are not accidental.
ffsm8 4 hours ago [-]
Laying flat is completely different though.
It's the realization in china that their efforts will never amount to meaningful rewards, hence they scale down the effort to what's absolutely necessary for survival. Living without a home and only working maybe 1 day a week to get enough food to not die.
Equivalent in Europe would be to just be homeless and get by on social security, US probably getting by on food stamps.
What you see here is subtly different: they see the sword of damocles. Whatever they may do, the end may come at any point and they have no way to influence it.
But to go back to the initial question of what to do: you ignore it. You cannot do anything about it, hence you can only gamble that it doesn't manifest and work under that assumption. If it does manifest youre fucked anyway. But if it doesn't, you're gucci
pandalism 10 minutes ago [-]
Might be a nitpick this doesn't seem like a sword of Damocles type scenario, that implies the constant, and extraordinary, risk of decisions taken from a position of power, aka you get the throne but the swords there ready to kill you for a minute action/decision and you lose it all.
I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that no matter what you decide, how you act, bigger phenomena than you is the only thing that matters?
soco 2 hours ago [-]
Where is this obsession with predicting the future comping from? Did humanity ever predict the future?`Yet it somehow thrived, brought us here and enabled us to complain about the lack of fortune-telling.
bluGill 1 hours ago [-]
You cannot predict details of the future, but you can make enough predictions for reasonable purposes. The sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Between December and February next year it will drop below freezing, and snow. The weather will support a garden most summers (enough rain, not too hot or cold), but only if I'm planing specific plants that do well in my climate, there are some foods that will never work where I live and so I can predict the future enough to risk planting them.
Most people thinking about predicting the future are asking for either more details which we cannot give, but the trend is good enough and nobody thinks about it.
doctorwho42 57 minutes ago [-]
And within your examples lie the rub, we are losing the ability to predict or rely on those weather patterns which have served our species for the past 10,000 years.
Hell, some of the largest civilization upheavals and collapses were due to localized climate disruptions (sometimes planet wide). Volcano in place (a) erupted and the temperature dropped enough to impact growing cycles, etc
andyferris 2 hours ago [-]
It always required a leap of faith - that’s the point of life, getting married and having kids.
Not so many generations ago parents might not know if they’d survive to see their children reach adulthood (or if their children would survive, or if they’d be infertile, or die during childbirth). My parents are boomers who ended up doing well, but had to buy a house at a 17% interest rate and low wages not knowing if that was a smart or dumb move. The current generation face huge land values (but have better medicine and moderate interest rates). Who would you trade places with, without the benefit of hindsight?
doctorwho42 45 minutes ago [-]
Someone in my career in the 1950's... In a heart beat, even if I didn't know what was coming next.
High taxes lead to reinvestment.
stephc_int13 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jameslk 13 hours ago [-]
> 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
captainbland 2 hours ago [-]
> The masses work because they want to consume
For many millennials and younger working people a huge bulk of income is taken up by housing. There's also a cliff edge of jobs when you transition from full time to part time, it's only rarely possible to find part time work which pays enough to sustain living costs.
This leads to a situation in which people have to work full time in order to meet basic conditions of living and many consumer items like TVs and streaming subscriptions can be had at prices which are negligible compared to their fundamental living costs.
bluGill 1 hours ago [-]
They choose to live on part time income. You can have roommates which greatly reduces your cost of housing. You can eat "steak and lobster", or "rice and beans". Not everyone buys streaming subscriptions, and not just the Amish are doing without.
I wouldn't choose most of the above either, which is why I have a full time job.
chrisrhoden 2 minutes ago [-]
The argument you are responding to is that people work full time and consume at that level because a step function in compensation (esp including healthcare) makes working part time infeasible even on rice and beans.
organsnyder 10 minutes ago [-]
In the United States, healthcare is a major factor, especially if you have a family.
monerochan 35 minutes ago [-]
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jbxntuehineoh 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
georgeecollins 3 hours ago [-]
> Everyone wants more
John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do.
Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive.
It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved.
It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.
throw0101c 20 minutes ago [-]
> John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want […]
This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable":
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.
bluGill 1 hours ago [-]
You can opt out by having roommates.
jameslk 13 hours ago [-]
> 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
toasty228 6 hours ago [-]
It's always the choice between flying cars and living in a hut made of cow dung, right? No in between is conceivable by the human brain, either boundless growth or the Neolithic
inglor_cz 6 hours ago [-]
I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.
A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.
Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.
I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.
Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.
toasty228 6 hours ago [-]
> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)
I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost
inglor_cz 5 hours ago [-]
Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.
You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.
nkrisc 3 hours ago [-]
> Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.
You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.
inglor_cz 50 minutes ago [-]
GP seems to prefer the 1960s, which would mean that the "not living enough to die from cancer" would likely be off the table.
toasty228 3 hours ago [-]
And how many people suffer/die from obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle disease (lookup the main causes of deaths in the US, and their causes) ? All I'm saying is that there is a middle ground between "living in huts made of cow dung and dying at 35" and "75% of your population is obese and die from literal over consumption and lack of physical activity"
> but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
Trump was elected twice, the voters are brain dead cattle anyways
> BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago
At what scale? People could go to the US in 1700 too, it doesn't mean that commercial airlines are sustainable at ANY rate
inglor_cz 48 minutes ago [-]
At scale lucrative enough to stage coups in Latin America. Read up upon this.
Let us not even go deeper to the Age of Sail. Large-scale trade and consumption of sugar, tobacco and cotton fueled slavery operations from Virginia down to Brazil, long before a lightbulb was even a thing.
pjerem 5 hours ago [-]
> without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.
Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.
inglor_cz 4 hours ago [-]
OK, true, but the question is: what is the minimum workplace effort of living people that must go into that organizing process? Let us measure it in hours for the sake of simpliticy.
In the extremes, 1 hour weekly is probably too little and 100 hours weekly is excessive. But given how almost the entire world has converged to approx. 40 on average, I'd be surprised if it was very different from 40.
Yes, this may change with robots and AI.
2 hours ago [-]
Ma8ee 8 hours ago [-]
If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.
At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?
jameslk 7 hours ago [-]
Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht
What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?
While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.
throw0101c 10 minutes ago [-]
> What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?
If your job involves network connectivity and SSH, satellite Internet would allow you to do your job on your yacht where ever it happens to be, even in the middle of an ocean.
James Hamilton, Senior Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, [1] was doing this 15+ years ago as he motored around the world in a Nordhavn 52 [2] with his wife:
> Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.
Sounds like a poshy neighborhood colonized by expats.
I mean, I do share the values but it's definitely a luxury and entitled position (with its own consequences on the rest of the locals sharing the same city)
supriyo-biswas 6 hours ago [-]
> If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories
Handwaving away constraints on production on physical goods because of advances in code generation is a new one.
rcxdude 5 hours ago [-]
I think this is a deliberately somewhat fantastical hypothetical scenario (though not far off the sales pitch from humanoid robot companies).
AngryData 11 hours ago [-]
Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
defrost 11 hours ago [-]
Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade.
African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.
Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
Maxatar 10 hours ago [-]
>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.
UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
Many of them live in shacks made from wooden pallets and corrugated iron roofs instead. This is true across much of the Third World – Brazil, Haiti, South Africa and Indonesia all have them for example.
jameslk 11 hours ago [-]
I’m talking about how many people lived in the past
OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
TheOtherHobbes 4 hours ago [-]
From people I know who traveled, the people in thatched huts are sometimes reported to be far happier than we are.
And a lot of people in the US can't afford hospitals or antibiotics today.
CalRobert 8 hours ago [-]
Thatched roofs are an expensive art installation compared to many other types
Waterluvian 13 hours ago [-]
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.
oersted 6 hours ago [-]
An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly.
It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.
Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.
This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
kakacik 4 hours ago [-]
I work on 90% contract, meaning I get cca 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly, and its usual 5 days a week workload. Net income hit is somewhere around 6-7% of salary.
There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids.
People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short.
Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.
oersted 3 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis.
I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice.
I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.
nmcfarl 42 minutes ago [-]
I really think this depends on the job. As soon as I read your initial comment, I thought about locums in medicine, people who float for as little as a weekend at a time, and as a little as once a quarter at any particular hospital. And the entire hospital industry has been built around them at least in the western United States. They’re clearly contributing something.
I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.
2 hours ago [-]
crazylogger 5 hours ago [-]
This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.
nkrisc 3 hours ago [-]
Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.
jrflowers 4 hours ago [-]
It’s 3 extra days per week OP. People live for a bunch of weeks. It’d only be 3 days total if they had the lifespan of a moth
KptMarchewa 4 hours ago [-]
It is possible to frontload the effort though and FIRE.
It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week.
Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.
bcjdjsndon 5 hours ago [-]
> If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat
What about never working for 2billion% more?
blks 7 hours ago [-]
Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?
toasty228 6 hours ago [-]
50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...
chongli 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pixl97 11 hours ago [-]
In theory in a robot economy you'll have 100% of the food and shelter you need to some standard, hopefully a decent one. The particular issue with how the world currently is is some people have 60% of their food and shelter while other people have 30000%
nextaccountic 13 hours ago [-]
> 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
chongli 12 hours ago [-]
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.
lan321 5 hours ago [-]
Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
alchemism 4 hours ago [-]
You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.
peepee1982 6 hours ago [-]
I'm definitely jealous of the free time homeless people have. I just don't want to make the choice for my children to be homeless with me.
littlexsparkee 10 hours ago [-]
That's assuming all of your current pay is going to necessities - salaries here pay well in excess provided your 'wants' are few, you can cover the things that matter (housing, food, etc) and get your time back.
stephc_int13 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jameslk 12 hours ago [-]
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
stephc_int13 12 hours ago [-]
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.
> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around.
Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.
It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.
People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.
Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.
Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.
kjshsh123 2 hours ago [-]
Necessities count as consumption. You could survive off rice and live in an internet cafe for $15/night. I don't know what you think the traditional sense of the word "consumption" is.
mothballed 1 hours ago [-]
At the lower levels it's mostly meeting arbitrary regulatory requirements. You can live in a shack for next to no rent just fine, but the state will steal your kids 'cuz neglect, inferior shelter' and then they'll condemn your shack and dump you on the streets where it's ~illegal to be homeless.
kjshsh123 13 minutes ago [-]
The person I replied to was trying to separate necessities from consumption in the "traditional sense of the word".
No doubt there's problematic regulations like exclusionary zoning laws. But you can't say that these regulations are so binding that there is no choice and no expression of preferences as opposed to needs in their choices. Lots of homes still have unmandated second floors, basements, bathrooms, and square footage.
The human brain is great at (ir)rationalizing wants as needs. If you want to live in a nice place in a high-cost of living city, that's a want, not a need.
jongjong 3 hours ago [-]
> Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.
100%. Most people can be very happy with very low consumption. What people want is not to work.
The happiest time in my life was when I was earning a measily $40K per year in passive income from crypto and didn't work. It was the lowest salary I ever had, least I ever consumed and happiest I'd ever been. The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working. If you don't work, you don't need to consume anywhere near as much. When my wife quit her job 10 years ago, our rate of savings stayed the same because we spent less and quality of life went up significantly for both of us.
Anyone who enjoys working is delusional. What they call work is not work; they're living in a parallel reality where the economy rewards them for playing the big boss and sitting on their asses and watching their money compound... Everything they're doing is meaningless; it only serves as a narrative device to justify the handouts that they'd be getting regardless. Just look at Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; he probably made more money after he resigned from the CEO role. It's incredible really when you look at Microsoft's product offerings these days; even Bill Gates knew to dump MSFT and now has less money than Ballmer. It's like the economy punishes people for having common sense.
doctorwho42 43 minutes ago [-]
Who owns the machines and their output?
I don't think anyone is saying that it wouldn't be great if we didn't have to work to survive and thrive. What they are saying is, based on current trends, we are more heading for one of those scifi dystopias than star trek.
wyldfire 13 hours ago [-]
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.
stephc_int13 13 hours ago [-]
No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.
blks 7 hours ago [-]
Machines don’t exist by themselves, someone owns them.
athrowaway3z 5 hours ago [-]
There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter.
If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more.
Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.
marcus_holmes 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Loughla 12 hours ago [-]
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.
GeoAtreides 7 hours ago [-]
No, that's a read from people who equate suffering and toiling with meaning. The Culture is a true utopia, Iain says it explicitly.
akomtu 11 hours ago [-]
Minds keep humans as pets.
arethuza 5 hours ago [-]
I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
Free-to-roam pets are still pets. The Minds are benevolent dictators, and generally seek not to be seen as such by humans.
TheOtherHobbes 3 hours ago [-]
What would the Minds do if all humans wanted to leave?
arethuza 50 minutes ago [-]
Probably sublime... who knows!
theptip 10 hours ago [-]
The important question is, who has power in such an economy?
In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.
Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.
I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.
david_shi 6 hours ago [-]
Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights.
If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed. An ownership class with killer robot armies living in luxury while they exterminate the rest of humanity would be quite possible in theory. After all, we've seen how slave-holders, the Nazis and many other malfeasants behaved in the past.
But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.
Not letting any of this happen would be a good idea. Really maybe don't build the Torment Nexus.
dogwalker5000 2 hours ago [-]
> the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.
That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners first.
dosisking 10 hours ago [-]
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"
iamflimflam1 4 hours ago [-]
Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
When we hit AGI and the robots rise up against us. Make sure you delete this post.
stymaar 4 hours ago [-]
AGI is supposed to be about the capabilities of AI, there's no reason why they should have developed self consciousness/self preservation / willingness to exert control, in the process.
(And conversely, universal paperclip is a great illustration that an autonomous agent doesn't need to achieve human-like intelligence to “rise” against us)
peterldowns 13 hours ago [-]
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.
stephc_int13 13 hours ago [-]
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.
hurtigioll 5 hours ago [-]
Nick Land is a difficult subject to get into, because there are two of thems.
and you might discard the first one because of the second one.
Nick Land spoiler: "what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."
imtringued 6 hours ago [-]
>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment.
You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on.
You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters.
You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either.
You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips.
You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house.
Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm.
You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work.
A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is.
>Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
That sounds a whole lot like consumption to me.
stephc_int13 3 hours ago [-]
You missed the point entirely.
What fuels the economy, for now, is human work. Being a consumer simply means that you are heavily incentivised to take part (by working).
If machines can do the same or better, whoever owns them will end-up seeing unproductive humans as dangerous and wasteful bloat.
It won’t be a life of infinite leisure if you don’t own machines.
gkaivida1 6 hours ago [-]
It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value.
Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes.
That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy"
Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.
corimaith 2 hours ago [-]
While it's not improbable to see some theoretical realized "sovereign" individual who can wholly run and own a civilization themselves as the sole master, that is ultimately the logical progression of the empowerment of the individual through Modernism, which we have signed up for as opposed to hunter-gatherers.
You could replace AI with Advanced Education or Automation or Transhumanism really and get the same result, but I don't think there is really a "solution" beyond either staying as pets or catching up as an individual.
But at the same time, even if the rich become completely autonomous to the rest in some walled enclave, that would just resolve to the unemployed all just creating their own parallel economy again. You might loose much of the inheritance of wealth and infrastructure from the preceding civilization, but then again the preceding civilization's own norms that legacy was owned by the rich, so it's just returning back to basics.
13 hours ago [-]
shellkr 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
andrewmutz 15 hours ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 15 hours ago [-]
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).
pirate787 13 hours ago [-]
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.
carlob 5 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure no Marxist considers Piketty a fellow Marxist, he's much closer to social democracy and Keynes. Piketty advocates for market economy and a global capital tax, Marxists on the other hand advocate for the violent overthrowing of capitalism and collective ownership of the means of production. Can you spot the difference?
wyre 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe critique his ideas instead of his predictions. Piketty is an economist, not a future-teller.
Maxatar 10 hours ago [-]
What's the significance of his "ideas" with respect to economics if they don't lead to actual predictions?
Why did he decide to make these predictions if his ideas supposedly have no bearing on how predictions are created?
Does economics no longer even have the pretense of being a science, which by its very nature exists to make testable predictions?
lll-o-lll 5 hours ago [-]
If we are going to start discounting economists based on failure to correctly predict things like - interest rates - then you’re going to be chopping the entire mainstream field. If any economist was ever beholden to making accurate predictions, the field would currently be vacant.
MSFT_Edging 2 hours ago [-]
Economics isn't a science. It's a vibe check. That's why unprofitable companies make up a majority of the stock market.
jdkoeck 9 hours ago [-]
If he is confident enough to make economic predictions, it’s only fair that we take him to task on these.
> 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.
chadgpt3 3 hours ago [-]
A visit to the USSR makes one a capitalist, a visit to the USA makes one a communist. Maybe they both suck?
viccis 9 hours ago [-]
>for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.
Love to see you mix unsubstantiated vitriol with overt lies like this.
AngryData 11 hours ago [-]
Anyone who flat out dismisses others work because they are "marxist" is only proclaiming their own ignorance on economic topics.
TalkingCodeMonk 8 hours ago [-]
Also remember that the Koch Bros (plus numerous other billionaires) have spent billions [0] poisoning economics academia by funding their narcissistic version of pseudo-libertarianism across think tanks, lobbyists, and colleges... They're so "Libertarian" they believe corporate dictatorship is freedom and poisoning their communities is the communities problem.
I remember first going to a party at an Economics students house 20 years ago, and thinking they all seemed like they were in a cult. Wasn't until fairly recently I figured out it was from propaganda.
junior trader for a bank looses $10 mil. boss asks him what happened. trader says he sold oil because bank economist said oil price will go down. boss fires him. junior asks how could he become a good trader if he's fired on the first losing trade. boss says "no, you idiot, I didn't fire you because you made a losing trade, I fired you because you listened to our economist"
koe123 13 hours ago [-]
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?
PaulHoule 13 hours ago [-]
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.
koe123 10 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a similar track, and I agree that its a useful skill and talent.
What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.
kakacik 4 hours ago [-]
This is correct behavior. There must be a name for this effect of having some more or less shallow understanding and feeling like an actual expert with decades of experience from various sides of the topic.
SWEs I think are more susceptible to this since as you say we often dip in many areas and industries. No, we are not actual SMEs and proper experts (barring exceptions of course, but in any case we usually have a specific view on domain, while proper experts understand many/all views).
drtz 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
koe123 10 hours ago [-]
I think more broadly that grabbing attention with predictions and hot takes has become lucrative, and we definitely don’t celebrate prediction accuracy.
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
> listen to economists
Did anyone ever keep track of how often economists turn out to be right about anything? I didn't, but have the feeling that it isn't much better than flipping a coin.
corimaith 2 hours ago [-]
Reality is messy. But they are the ones at least thinking the most about this, and I'd say the coin is still overall weighted in their favour than listening to an uninformed opinion.
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
That could be true, but the self-reflection could be a lot better.
athrowaway3z 5 hours ago [-]
No serious economist would claim such a thing. In fact, it was all the rage a decade ago for economists to remind everyone that they - in fact - should not be looked at to do this.
> An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
827a 12 hours ago [-]
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.
david_shi 15 hours ago [-]
"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."
Animats 12 hours ago [-]
I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence.
That was pushed over the top by hype and overfunding before it was cost effective. Like Uber and Space-X.
I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life.
If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
setsewerd 2 hours ago [-]
> I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names
> If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
It may not have been a nasty name but damn that was brutal.
david_shi 10 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately a lot of (economics) research is co-opted to reinforce and obfuscate in service of power.
13 hours ago [-]
forgetfreeman 15 hours ago [-]
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Quinner 15 hours ago [-]
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.
materielle 13 hours ago [-]
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.
TomasBM 4 hours ago [-]
You're interpreting the claims more strongly than they were presented, IMO.
> One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group
There doesn't have to be a fully cohesive group of an entire class for there to be negative consequences for the non-members of that class. The members also don't have to be cohesive or aligned at first, but they will tend to align on issues that threaten their position.
For example, we have historically seen that the incumbent elites tend to be anti-socialist/-communist, because their relative position and power are threatened, even if their populations and some (aspiring) elites are remotely pro-socialist. And because the coercive power of incumbents is often much higher than the power of some populace or aspirants (i.e., they have more to offer to those who hold coercive power), they will tend to succeed in pushing against the majority.
The entire history of the US, UK, Germany, France, Russia (etc.) is full of such examples.
> that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy.
It doesn't have to be hermetically sealed to exclude certain populations.
On a global level, many countries don't trade with each other, and their economies are doing fine. Hard sanctions and cold wars even make this intentional, rather than a product of "we don't have anything to offer to each other".
On a local level, most people don't interact with the "homeless"/unhoused, and the latter often don't have much to offer to the former. Most Western countries don't need to hermetically separate the rich from the rest, but if you look at Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia or even the US, gated communities are common in some areas. Most of the rest outside don't have much to offer to those inside.
Taken together: if it's plausible, and we don't know how probable it may be, we may want to figure that out, instead of hoping it's not probable.
ang_cire 14 hours ago [-]
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...
hurtigioll 15 hours ago [-]
I guess you don't know about North Korea
chongli 13 hours ago [-]
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.
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
Russia and Japan too.
nisegami 1 hours ago [-]
Is this supposed to be sarcastic?
baron816 13 hours ago [-]
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.
xyzzy123 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
qsera 12 hours ago [-]
>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.
crabmusket 11 hours ago [-]
> Isn't that the idea?
No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:
> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.
The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?
I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.
Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.
But that's still not "abundance for all".
mjanx123 7 hours ago [-]
> The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population.
At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done.
At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison.
The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you.
Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs
Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs
Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison
Population: how did you say we can get them?
A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots.
Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.
stephc_int13 11 hours ago [-]
It is never really “for free”.
It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work.
They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.
qsera 10 hours ago [-]
>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
stephc_int13 10 hours ago [-]
Otherwise you could say that humans are working for free as well, as they can cultivate their own food and even build themselves by making babies.
stephc_int13 10 hours ago [-]
Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.
qsera 9 hours ago [-]
By free, I mean "free of human effort"
stephc_int13 2 hours ago [-]
If you own a factory, what you see is a big box with input and output, human labor is just an annoying variable, removing it won't turn the entire thing "free".
The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.
qsera 2 hours ago [-]
I am thinking of a case where governments will own the robots. People will pay some minimal tax to pay for the maintenance of the robots. If other robots can be made to do it, then even that cost is saved.
Government will, among other things, oversee that the needs of the people are well served by these robots.
stephc_int13 2 hours ago [-]
If you think about it states are not much different than corporations.
Taxes is human labor dedicated to the maintenance of state.
I think it is naive to think that once humans are not needed they will magically be fed by the machines.
qsera 49 minutes ago [-]
>If you think about it states are not much different than corporations.
At least democracies have elections and that is a big difference.
danaris 7 hours ago [-]
Energy has become nearly free, though, as the space- and cost-efficiency of solar skyrockets. That's really not the problem here.
ares623 12 hours ago [-]
> 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?
qsera 12 hours ago [-]
>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.
shimman 11 hours ago [-]
The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5].
All these programs poll above majorities in the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too.
If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people."
It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions.
Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)?
People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.
You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.
Tell me, how many elites have a nuclear weapon.
danaris 7 hours ago [-]
> The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
Yes, but how it changes depends entirely on who owns the robots.
There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, and huge evidence that self-centered wealthy billionaires (and trillionaires!) will own them.
In such a case, the response to "the robots will make everything" isn't "so give it away to the people for free! :-)". It's "so what do I need all these stupid people for? make killbots to keep them away from my fully-automated luxury oligarchy compound!"
qsera 6 hours ago [-]
>There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots,
But that is up to the people and their governments to decide. You seem to miss the fact that governments are made by people and for the people, and not made by the billionaires. Even a billionaire have a single vote.
Government can outlaw the private ownership of combat autonomous robots if that is what the people want.
casey2 12 hours ago [-]
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.
fakedang 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mordae 8 hours ago [-]
> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Governments are no longer allowed to print money. Do you think they will be allowed to build unlimited supply of robots? You are funny.
All the robot factories will belong to rich and we will have to _beg_ to have some measly allocation _while_ we feed the police that prevents us from just taking them.
And politicians will mostly just say this is _inevitable_ for some reason or other.
qsera 6 hours ago [-]
But then why hasn't governments and the rich already collaborated converted all of us plebs into slaves?
If that has not happened already then why do you think so pessimistically?
imtringued 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
If you permit me to reference the blog post:
>It is a well attested fact that human logic is far from flawless. We are all victims of our biases, emotions, and equally importantly, our implicit assumptions. Just like in mathematics, where all our theorems stem from sets of axioms, so do our beliefs stem from assumptions. But unlike in mathematics, where the axioms are concrete, explicit, and shaped by natural observations, the human logic's axioms are more abstract, implicit, and shaped by our knowledge and our cultural background.
You're making an implicit assumption that all land is owned by people who want to deprive you of the land and its products. You can't make the argument that a "rich person" is holding onto the land and eating all of the food produced by it, so it would be unfair for the "rich person" to give you access to the food.
The underlying problem here is access to land and this is an independent concern from "The Economy".
>Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.
Ok so you mentioned it, but this means we are no longer talking about the machines. In fact the presence or absence of machines is a completely irrelevant factor here. If you can get your hands on the machines, it turns into a non issue.
And as mentioned above, if you are exclusively producing for yourself, you don't need that much land, hence the people without land are in the right if they demand to get some of it. The very argument you made is that the people with the machines are better stewards of the land, but this logic only makes sense in the presence of them producing for an outside consumer. If they just hold onto the land and do nothing with it, their hypothetical productivity increase is worth nothing compared to the very real zero yield they produce by doing nothing. Even an inefficient production process has higher absolute productivity than doing nothing.
Take it one step further. From the perspective of the low productivity producers the land is very valuable and from the perspective of the high productivity autark producer, the land is worth very little. If the autark producer wants to role play a feudalist and puts an army of killer robots there, he would be expending a lot of resources for something that the producer doesn't consider valuable. Since the low productivity producers consider the land more valuable, their military budget per acre is actually higher.
So now the second underlying assumption is that the landless people are defeated by the robot army of the landed people. I hope you see where this is going. It's not about economics at this point anymore. It's some weird power fantasy where some group of people always wins and another group of people always loses.
markdown 12 hours ago [-]
The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.
jameslk 12 hours ago [-]
> 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
adrianN 12 hours ago [-]
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.
chadgpt3 3 hours ago [-]
You need land to do anything, even just to exist.
starbugs 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Always impressive how smoothly complex constraints vanish in these models.
ares623 12 hours ago [-]
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"
shimman 11 hours ago [-]
You should check out "Four Futures" by Peter Frase. This would be the "extermination" future and like you I think it's the most likely one without extreme counteraction.
numpad0 8 hours ago [-]
> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.
And that's communist. I don't understand why nobody seem to see the irony or the miscategorization. This isn't to be critical of this comment, but my righteousness obsessed mind says that people pushing for the dual-layer system where few controls classical economy without humans and rest using their own systems needs to be relabeled from capitalist to proto-Soviet style totalitarian anarcho-Communist.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12 hours ago [-]
>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?
tsunamifury 12 hours ago [-]
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.
cbondurant 44 minutes ago [-]
ironic, given the title, that I can't read this article on my main desktop, because cloudflare's bot detection has had me as a false positive for years now. I'm just forever stuck on the cloudflare captcha.
No space for this human here, I guess.
Edit after reading through this on a seperate device that hasn't been banned from most of cloudflare:
I think this guy is vastly underestimating the amount of humans that are still in the production loop of almost every supply chain.
Consider the humble through-hole LED. A product that surely has reached near the absolute peak of production line optimization, being an almost purely fungible product who's form factor will never change. They are still manually put together by humans. A sheet of semiconductor diodes is separated with a manually operated machine for human access. the prongs are placed into a jig by hand, so that a semi-automated machine can place each diode onto the correct leg. Then the jig is placed, again by hand, into position for the injection molded plastic dome.
It's not just one long automated pipeline that has a couple of hoppers for raw materials at one end and finished LEDs at the other. real human beings are still involved at every step of the process. If we can't achieve end-to-end automation for something as dead simple as the humble through-hole LED, after almost 50 years of process improvement? Technology will never fully remove the human from the economy.
kingstnap 15 hours ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 15 hours ago [-]
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!
NuclearPM 15 hours ago [-]
More tax cuts to the rich.
smallmancontrov 15 hours ago [-]
Oh my god I can just FEEL the growth! It's going to trickle down any second now! Any second!
There is growth, it might not be where you are, or it might be superimposed with other effects for you.
smallmancontrov 13 hours ago [-]
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.
outside1234 14 hours ago [-]
Have you not looked at Elon's bank account? WINNING*
* via government subsidies
graphime 14 hours ago [-]
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smallmancontrov 13 hours ago [-]
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.
littlexsparkee 10 hours ago [-]
That's helpful if you're privileged enough to amass enough to invest before labor's share of output collapses.
bluefirebrand 8 hours ago [-]
Can you estimate what percentage of the population has a meaningful amount of money in funds like this?
aceki 13 hours ago [-]
wow, pennies on the dollar and yet there’s a trillionaire
graphime 13 hours ago [-]
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pixl97 11 hours ago [-]
Sorry, they've been bought off by said trillionaires.
jMyles 14 hours ago [-]
> 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?
chongli 13 hours ago [-]
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.
phendrenad2 9 hours ago [-]
Why does running a government require a lot of cash flow? To pay people? Like, labor..?
jameslk 11 hours ago [-]
This discussion thread is so full of slippery slope fallacies and plot holes it’s so hard to take seriously. I think it’s safe to say nobody knows for sure how AI will exactly change the economy in the long term. Humans are complex and often unpredictably irrational (see also: behavioral economics), let alone stacking on assumptions about how technology might progress. It might as well be noise
It’s fun to speculate on a sci-fi level, but I don’t think the long term endgame is worth losing any sleep over yet
codexon 14 hours ago [-]
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.
YZF 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pixl97 10 hours ago [-]
>What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?
I mean, there may be some things certain groups specialize in, like augmented obedient humans with 15 titties that these people trade back and forth.
But here's the thing, what if they don't need to trade anything? You get to be a nation unto yourself (and your slaves).
The particular problem we have is without something for 'labor' to do in the future the world we have now breaks.
jaggederest 13 hours ago [-]
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.
lazide 13 hours ago [-]
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.
codexon 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jaggederest 13 hours ago [-]
It's especially funny to me that Nozick's utility monster was alive and about 3 years old when he wrote the paper.
__s 14 hours ago [-]
Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up
kart23 7 hours ago [-]
the economy sucks. the fact that cars cost 30k. the fact that morrocco has high speed rail and california doesn’t. the fact that practically no new housing gets built in san francisco.
the economy needs to get a whole lot better before i would even consider something like this looking true. human demands are wildly elastic, which is why we’re not all farmers riding around in horse drawn carriages still.
atleastoptimal 15 hours ago [-]
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.
coderenegade 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dodu_ 14 hours ago [-]
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.
mawadev 14 hours ago [-]
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?
annzabelle 14 hours ago [-]
"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.
xg15 14 hours ago [-]
Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?
jstanley 14 hours ago [-]
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?
elvis10ten 4 hours ago [-]
In your examples, I can still find the “for whom”, even if that is several layers deep. I’m trying to understand your position: are you saying the same will be true in the ongoing case, just that we don’t know the connections yet?
jstanley 1 hours ago [-]
Approximately, yes.
In a sense all this communication is "for somebody". But do you know all the communication your laptop is doing? Do you really claim it is all for you, or all for your benefit? Or is it just something the laptop does that isn't really for anyone in particular?
elvis10ten 20 minutes ago [-]
> But do you know all the communication your laptop is doing? Do you really claim it is all for you, or all for your benefit? Or is it just something the laptop does that isn't really for anyone in particular?
Hmm, why would anyone add comms to a laptop if there wasn’t some benefactor in some way? The way I see it is that it’s either benefiting me or benefiting the company which ends up benefiting some individuals (and sometimes me again).
magicalist 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jstanley 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pixl97 10 hours ago [-]
Yea, the original statistic was not about bytes, but about connections, in which 57% of all traffic on the web is not from a direct human action.
>But these bytes are in service of a human?
I mean, lets say that 99.9% of all traffic on the net was by one person running an AI to get them rich, we'd call that traffic 'in service of a human' by your set of rules but it does kind of break historically how pretty much all communication in history worked until we started controlling stuff with wires and radios. That is, one person with one prompt can cause a hell of a lot of communication now.
And we're not even at the point of AGI/ASI yet. That's when some other agent with their non-human goals can start doing things.
lazide 13 hours ago [-]
Bots defrauding bots while training new fraud bots.
ethersteeds 14 hours ago [-]
Sounds terrible
AndrewKemendo 14 hours ago [-]
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
sheepscreek 5 hours ago [-]
I have been discussing a similar thought experiment in private circles for about 3 years now. It goes like this:
If the world population hits a ceiling (or starts to shrink), and corporations get more massive - reaching every citizen on earth, how can they continue to grow?
Assuming the typical pathways of acquisition/merger have been exhausted. Now you're looking at a world of abundance, and corporations must invent ways to generate demand.
So what if, robots could be state owned and be treated as a special class of robot citizens? They could earn a wage (or some kind of credits) and spend them for benefits like upgrades or repairs. Not just humanoids, all robots. With this, one could essentially create infinite demand-supply channels.
sheepscreek 5 hours ago [-]
As an extension to this, in this world - most typical things humans need for survival will be made extremely cheap and abundant. Universal income would give every individual the means to afford them. Every person on earth (or at least in certain societies) will be able to live comfortably (not luxuriously, but comfortable - ie. survival becomes commoditized). People would only work to have a purpose.
kakacik 5 hours ago [-]
We discuss this while half of the world is malnourished, there are entire regions with fanatical religious extremists doing (successfully) all they can to keep those regions in medieval times, and west has no real way to change that.
Its not going to happen in my lifetime, that's sure but its a nice academic what-if discussion.
secult 4 hours ago [-]
Regarding the unstable times: Consider living in any year in the past 50 years or so. There are shocks and game-changing events happening subsequently after each of the year you have possibly chosen. Oil crisis here, war there, collapse of some country, technological breakthrough, etc.. Unless you live in countries, where you don't plan for years, but for months or days upfront. Then your life is much more stereotypical, when you just try to survive every day.
ipython 49 minutes ago [-]
Kinda ironic that the blog article about a "peopleless economy" is gated behind a "prove you're human" CAPTCHA from Cloudflare.
2001zhaozhao 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jzig 15 hours ago [-]
You just described the plot of Alien: Earth!
jordwest 13 hours ago [-]
Paraphrasing Nate Hagens, at the end of the day the modern economy just turns megalitres of oil into microlitres of dopamine
moomoo11 15 hours ago [-]
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
whatever1 14 hours ago [-]
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.
baron816 13 hours ago [-]
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.
cousin_it 13 hours ago [-]
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.
crabmusket 11 hours ago [-]
A data centre the size of Gormenghast, with the remains of humanity clinging like limpets to the outer walls, trying to stay warm.
</doomer>
carlob 5 hours ago [-]
> trying to stay cool
FTFY
bigbadfeline 8 hours ago [-]
> It doesn't have to be winner-take-all,
Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
baq 9 hours ago [-]
The technical term is ‘mirror life’.
bigbadfeline 8 hours ago [-]
> Why is it a winner takes all situation?
Because there are a few winners who are happy to collectively monopolize the market - e.g RAM - nobody is increasing production, China is blocked from the market by sanctions and tariffs, the rest are more than happy to ask for a 1000% more than just a few years ago. Why would they do anything else - it's absolutely not in their interest for the prices to come down.
> There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI.
There isn't and won't be any "intense competition" - nobody can compete without hardware and it's now monopolized and affordable only to a token few.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
In the light of the current reality, this can only be classified as hallucinations. Actually, previously commoditized markets have become inaccessible and the trend is the exact opposite of what you're saying. It's bizarre to read naked assertions, which are not only without evidence but with all evidence pointing to the opposite.
> That competition is going to bring down costs for everything.
Back to reality, a new Teddy Roosevelt isn't going to magically reappear, not in either of the two parties. Imagine the world without him... we're almost there.
rdedev 9 hours ago [-]
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
The underlying assumption here is that there is always something established players won't try to buy out new companies or use their existing capital to screw over others
> The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies
Right now that is not the case. Look at the PC industry. I worry for the autonomy of a consumer in the future. It's probably going to be something like here is your rental thin client PC with agents on a monthly rental plan. What's that? you want to build a game with your own gpu? No no. A consumer grade gpu does not make sense in this day and age. Just ask the agent to build your game. We need the gpu compute for better things
aabhay 11 hours ago [-]
Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires
paul7986 11 hours ago [-]
Without humans and our content, AI is irrelevant! For it to stay relevant I think it needs to pay every human for the daily content we all create (daily conversations, photos, videos) and choose to publish to web daily. Cloudflare only lets bots into our websites upon AI bots from all industries pay to enter our sites.
Overall if we want to keep this society economy we are use to with AI in the picture ... we need to thrive off of AI .. not just AI thriving off our backs and destroying the society we know.
Though we could all just go back to living off the land...
ransom1538 11 hours ago [-]
"Why is it a winner takes all situation?"
I have lawyer agent x10 better than yours in a civil matter. Guess who wins. What value is second best lawyer?
nradov 9 hours ago [-]
That's meaningless. First, there's no evidence that one legal agent would be 10x better than another. Second, winning a case requires more than just a good lawyer. At some point you have to actually have the facts and/or law on your side.
Some of you have never spent any time in a courtroom and it shows.
solumunus 10 hours ago [-]
It depends on the evidence available.
__MatrixMan__ 9 hours ago [-]
Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.
Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets.
I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.
pmontra 9 hours ago [-]
Wealth is not a goal, it shouldn't be. Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power, not necessarily with money. So yes, it will always matter especially to people that like to have power over other people.
e40 9 hours ago [-]
Of course it does. It’s still a measurement though against other super rich.
verisimi 4 hours ago [-]
Monetary wealth is a proxy for power.
> Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.
I think this is already the case.
BobbyTables2 12 hours ago [-]
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.
ShinyLeftPad 11 hours ago [-]
For some people it's a zero sum game. If you have 99% of it, you won.
foogazi 11 hours ago [-]
> then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it
They can give them drones to aim at - enjoy your serfdom, let the AI tell you how to live your best life, don’t worry and don’t step out of the walled garden
nearbuy 9 hours ago [-]
Not much point in serfdom when they don't have use for human labor.
jameslk 13 hours ago [-]
> 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?
whatever1 13 hours ago [-]
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)
jameslk 12 hours ago [-]
> 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
strken 11 hours ago [-]
Money is a mirage. You can't use dollars to hold land; you need force projection.
Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them.
You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase with no injection of money at all.
jameslk 11 hours ago [-]
We can’t magically skip steps. It’s like South Park’s underwear gnomes. We’re missing steps in between and hand waving them away
strken 9 hours ago [-]
The first comment said "They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?"
I was explaining that money is irrelevant and so are the jobless masses. Someone owns the factories, and that person is the one who is relevant here. They of course need to be convinced, by money or other means, but the jobless masses are only relevant to the extent that they own and control wealth; since they are jobless, they probably have very little ownership or control.
You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
jameslk 8 hours ago [-]
> You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
Whoa there internet friend! I don't think I said anything about wealth concentration not being a trend. I'm just talking about AI. I'm still waiting for someone to explain coherent, undeniable watertight reasons that we're on a one-way track that goes from AI companies to infinite money glitch or robot death factories. I've already made my arguments against why I don't think it will happen before[0][1]
Maybe the argument is some already-rich fella with magic robot factories will have everything they will ever need, so they brush away all of humanity like an unsightly bit of dandruff on their shoulder with their kill bot drone army.
I guess if you squint at it long enough, that kinda sounds plausible. In the same way someone could press a giant red nuke button and have us all wiped out like a Terminator movie. But it's making a lot of fantastic assumptions without a lot of concreteness. That is, many people seem to be claiming "this is the AI endgame" rather than seeing other possibilities that aren't so ridiculously cynical or nihilistic with leaky abstractions
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the argument isn't that whoever controls AI will use it to kill everyone, it's that they'll control nearly everything because power snowballs.
They could kill everyone, so aren't you glad they decided to open a soup kitchen instead? Here, have some UBI. Of course, it's not quite "universal" yet, so you'll have to sell your house to make it under the means test. A local firm, owned by a national private equity company, forming part of an international portfolio fund, making up an ETF owned mostly by Anthropic investors, will be happy to buy that bit of real estate. Oh, you wrote that on social media? I'm afraid you're not the kind of tenant we're looking for.
This is basically how life already works for people who aren't capable of holding down a job today. I don't think it's ridiculously cynical or nihilistic to extrapolate from the available data and assume it's going to suck once working people have no bargaining power other than asking politely.
samrus 9 hours ago [-]
Money isnt real. If you can go to a peice of land and just claim it, and no one can rest it from you, then its your land.
Governments and society is what we make to avoid that sort of anarchy, but if certain entities become more powerful than the these institutions, then they can just take over whatever they want
lumost 11 hours ago [-]
The abstraction of capital and money get a bit funny when wealth is sufficiently concentrated. If there is a monopsomy (one buyer), then they can largely dictate the price of anything. If they also control violent coercion via a captured state or other means, then they can compel production at that price point.
The idea of capitalism only really makes sense when wealth is reasonably distributed such that there is still reasonable competition in both the marketplace and control of the state.
pixl97 11 hours ago [-]
You mean like the Russian oligarchs that keep 'investing' in the war they are in... oh, you mean where they fall out a window when they don't.
The next thing is the idea of money really does break down once you get automation without people. If you have said automation and enough materials to get going you can start increasing your 'wealth' in things like factories/robots/data where the now unemployed stop having any means to make more money. Hence you'll start buying up properties from people that are going bankrupt.
lazide 13 hours ago [-]
In any given game, why are there always a few (say 3) top players?
Same reason.
dyauspitr 14 hours ago [-]
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.
oh_my_goodness 13 hours ago [-]
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.
rogerrogerr 13 hours ago [-]
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.
whatever1 13 hours ago [-]
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.
qsera 12 hours ago [-]
>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!
vinyl7 16 minutes ago [-]
With the way things are now, the corporations own the government. The 'government' is not some sort of impartial mediator that people have been lead to believe it is
pastel8739 12 hours ago [-]
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
pixl97 11 hours ago [-]
>they are going to want to live in a society.
Now stop and imagine what kind of society the rich people you know and hear of would want to live in?
Do they want a bunch of poors around? Of course not. Do they want to give the money so they are not poor? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said poor people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of dumb people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them education so they are not dumb? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said dumb people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of ugly people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them plastic surgery, genetic manipulation so they are not ugly? Of course not. Would many of them 'erase' said ugly people. History says yes.
There are a number of people that already think that the Earths population should be culled back to a few million people. Giving people that believe this power seems to be a really good way to cause a genocide.
8note 8 hours ago [-]
so you can tear it down?
them rioting is a benefit, so you can justify sending in occupation forces to get rid of some
this is well practiced stuff in the west bank
oh_my_goodness 13 hours ago [-]
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.
rogerrogerr 11 hours ago [-]
> The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes
Sold to whom? Isn’t the argument that no one will have money? There are approximately as many houses in the US as there are households. We are not going to see all the houses empty and all the households homeless. Maybe the people who are currently buying at a time when home values are historically high will be shafted. But those houses will not end up empty.
> Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Reading comprehension. These are the two relevant statements - speaking of the average:
> we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
and speaking of HN denizens:
> average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
oh_my_goodness 2 hours ago [-]
>We are not going to see all the houses empty and all the households homeless.
... do you remember 2008? Or no? That was a tiny blip.
aidenn0 14 hours ago [-]
How will the people working on exactly what they want to eat?
vuurmot 13 hours ago [-]
by force
lazide 13 hours ago [-]
When someone else is making/distributing all the guns and ammo? Not so easy.
dyauspitr 13 hours ago [-]
Union robot armies
halfcat 12 hours ago [-]
Oh no a coronal mass ejection has taken out the power grid
mc32 14 hours ago [-]
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.
supertroop 12 hours ago [-]
In all likelihood you will end up more like a Syrian refugee than mr outdoor survivor manly man.
sosomoxie 13 hours ago [-]
Only if wealth will be evenly distributed, otherwise you're just enriching someone else.
bluefirebrand 13 hours ago [-]
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
8note 8 hours ago [-]
the jobs that actually need to be paid highly and the ones that do have little relation to each other
all those "heroes" and "essential workers" like people running the till at grocery stores should be getting paid a ton
mc32 3 hours ago [-]
Low skill jobs are unable to demand a ton of money. In most places they are sadly being replaced by self-serve kiosks where the “worker” gets paid nothing -that’s not entirely true, the shopper gets some of it in the form of a price break and the store gets some in the form of slightly better profits (they run at typically one percent net profit overall).
maest 13 hours ago [-]
"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.
mc32 11 hours ago [-]
Fairness can also be mathematical. Fair chances. No special treatment.
sosomoxie 13 hours ago [-]
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".
mc32 11 hours ago [-]
What would keep people from circumventing a roboticized society and forming their own human-based society? Buy good and services produced by other people and avoid and or penalize members who cheat -ostracize them. There can be parallel systems. Pretty much only communist systems prevent non-communist systems from operating. In capitalist systems communist systems that form from time to time fail because members grow disillusioned with the inevitable slackers and because they operate within a greater society can't just send slackers to gulags or re-educational camps.
the_af 8 hours ago [-]
In an hypothetical future where society has completely broken down because of extreme concentration of wealth (and means of production and everything) I can see there not being any possibility for a human-based society. In such a doomsday scenario, regular people wouldn't be able to trade anything because they wouldn't be able to produce anything, because all the land will be taken over by the very few ultrarich. Nowhere to live, nowhere to grow food, etc. Essentially surplus population. No government to protect you either, since it will have been coopted by the ultrarich (essentially, them becoming the government). Enforcement could be done by robots, and robots do not revolt or go on strike, nor will they question orders. Maintenance can be done by other robots, harvesting, even health care for the ultrarich.
So how (in this admittedly doomsday scenario that I hope won't come to pass) will a human-based society be able function?
spaqin 5 hours ago [-]
Your abilities, while not taken away, suddenly become close to useless as there's a far cheaper substitute, and rationally there is no point in hiring you for anything. Good luck earning your keep now.
dyauspitr 13 hours ago [-]
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.
BobbyTables2 12 hours ago [-]
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.)…
dyauspitr 10 hours ago [-]
I disagree. I think certain art and creative pursuits will always garner a premium when it’s human made, no matter how good something computer generated is. Just look at the game of chess. No one watches two computers playing each other even though they’re better than any human in the world. People watch other people play. There are lots of avenues like that where people will only watch other people do things, or only purchase things made by other people, even if they are lower quality.
I’m also envisioning an age of abundance. It’s not just your basic necessities of life met. If you have essentially free, electricity and all labor done by robots, that’s not an impossible thing to foresee.
I also think for a large group of people child rearing will take up a huge chunk of their time with many more children being born now that all of the unenviable parts of raising a child can be outsourced to robots.
Honestly, yes, it does sound like fantastical utopian thinking, but I don’t think you have to make that many leaps to get there.
mc32 11 hours ago [-]
Without direction or a pull in life people tend to self-destruct. Even the wealthy are susceptible to this. Hollywood nepotites are a nice example: they live off their parents's wealth or easily acquired money and self-destroy themselves. They are not engaging in higher pursuits but rather basic degeneration. Not all of course; some do good, productive things.
JackMorgan 11 hours ago [-]
It's easy to point to high profile nepotites but I've known plenty of folks from all classes who have self-destructed. It's hardly limited to those with lives of leisure.
dyauspitr 10 hours ago [-]
Many people will I think but not most. Also, since we’re talking about fantastical things, you could have lots of things to mitigate this. If someone has a pattern of self-destructive behavior, you could essentially have two robots follow them around everywhere as a more effective ankle bracelet. And they’re specifically tasked with keeping you from trouble and stopping you from ruining your life. Maybe that can replace prisons.
littlexsparkee 11 hours ago [-]
Not really - books and movies at the library are free and those who cultivate interests will find no trouble filling up the day.
AngryData 12 hours ago [-]
I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in 100+ miles with EM noise. And that is assuming their isn't any larger organized resistance organizations.
pixl97 11 hours ago [-]
EMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off.
The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide.
Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.
AngryData 5 hours ago [-]
I mean explosively pumped generators aren't new and were invented in the 50s. The hardest part is getting a fast enough explosive, however it doesn't take that much effort or chemistry knowledge to make supersonic explosives if someone needed it. And neodynium magnets are pretty common consumer products these day.
It is harder that just blowing stuff up, but when one side is using killer robots and other advanced electronics tech it doesn't seem like much effort in comparison. We already see criminal elements making guns and drugs and narco submarines, a fast explosive and magnets doesn't seem beyond reach to me.
hurtigioll 5 hours ago [-]
it's much cheaper to defend against EMP (Faraday shield) than to make EMPs
the fact that EMP blasts are not used in Ukraine, by both sides, to defend against drones also shows its not such a good idea
bigbadfeline 8 hours ago [-]
> I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans.
It's a supreme delusion that it can't. Military tech isn't in the 19th century anymore.
AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
What are robots and turrets going to do that humans couldn't do in their place even better? Humans have yet to invent a wall that can't be broken.
bcjdjsndon 5 hours ago [-]
Questions....
- what powers the robots? How is this power source maintained?
- when a robot is damaged, how is it repaired and where do the raw materials come from?
- when a robot simply doesn't work properly, who assesses the issue and resolves it?
- with 99% of the world population presumably starving to death, what is stopping them from overthrowing whoever is starving them to death?
muvlon 4 hours ago [-]
- electricity (from solar, hydro, nuclear, whatever). maintained by robots.
- it is repaired by robots using resources mined or reclaimed by robots.
- you guessed it, robots.
- robots with weapons.
If we actually want to prevent this doomsday scenario, I don't think it's wise to bet on "robots will never be able to do X".
bcjdjsndon 3 hours ago [-]
- you'll need to invent these robots first, so whats the ETA?
- same as above
- ditto
- a bit skynet, but it will still require humans in the loop. This is the least whacky though as it actually exists
5 hours ago [-]
cultofmetatron 5 hours ago [-]
we already have a fleet of autonomous robots composed of protein that solved this problem. its not infeasible for artificially created robots to eventually be able to do this stuff on their own.
bcjdjsndon 4 hours ago [-]
> to eventually be able to do this
Eventually being the key concept here. No doubt we'll automate a bunch of stuff, but not at this pace. The robots aren't good enough yet. General purpose robots are even further away.
For the foreseeable, you will still need wage slaves
bmacho 3 hours ago [-]
The future I see is that the Rich won't need people and they will have the means to defend themselves.
In the last 1-2 years I see more and more people mentioning guillotines, but I think very soon that won't be an opion anymore.
The Rich will be able to leave the mainlands, protect themselves, and let everyone else be controlled by robot police, and suffer. Maybe if there's something the Rich absolutely need from the mainlands (what?) then they can let everyone else compete with each other to serve the Rich to ease their shitty life a little.
In the past such societies needed a lot of people to serve the Rich, and to oppress everyone else, and it wasn't that sustainable, revolutions could happen. Very soon the Rich won't need anyone in this system, they will own the means of production by robots (no strikes), and the means of oppression, also by robots.
This is what I see when I look ahead. (BTW the US picking fights when they are the bad guys will result US companies necessarily having to turn to private/robot armies to protect "their property".)
Maybe I am wrong and this won't happen even if we do nothing. However I'd feel safer if we started to take away the unimaginable riches from the Rich, and started to empower the government, which is at least in theory controlled by the majority of the citizens.
azan_ 3 hours ago [-]
That's the worst type of doomerism. It doesn't pass even the most basic smell test. Do you think rich nowadays need billions of people to serve them?
TheWrongGuy 10 hours ago [-]
This author, like many before him, have decided that their lack of comprehension of a concept (in this case, money) is somehow proof that it can't be understood.
pianopatrick 13 hours ago [-]
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.
peab 13 hours ago [-]
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.
sieabahlpark 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vintagedave 16 hours ago [-]
This seems the kind of (scarily true) thing I’d expect Charles Stross to write about.
Procrastes 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, definitely. Shades of Accelerando, Saturn's Children, and Neptune's Brood. Give me the tentacles any day.
caconym_ 9 hours ago [-]
Seems like a fairly long winded and poorly written article to state the obvious: that you can in principle have one really rich guy enjoying a lifestyle similar to what he might enjoy today as a billionaire/trillionaire, except that instead of being sustained by production from an economy reliant on human labor, he has a robot factory/farm/etc. that makes everything he needs and wants. And at that point, of course, everybody else becomes an inconvenience (at best).
I don't really understand the comments (apparently) denying the basic logic of this scenario (maybe the article is so confusing that they, or I, am wrong about what it's trying to say). IMO the only real question is how close current technology is to achieving this scenario.
johnpaulgeorge 4 hours ago [-]
HERE IS A CHANGE PROVIDE A GOOD PRICE FOR OUR DATA. OUR DATA MUST NOT BE FREE. WHEN THEY (ALIENS AND GAYLORDS) EXTRACT OUR DATA PAY. MAKE THEM PAY. DONT TELL ME ECONOMY DOESNOT ALLOW THAT. CHANGE THE ECONOMY THEN.
As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down.
The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy.
This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune.
Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No.
While I somewhat agree on paper, the reality is that an economy where most of the population can't afford food and shelter, is one where rich folks heads end up on pikes pretty rapidly.
Unless the overlords are willing to implement UBI, they can't realistically cut 50% of the workforce from the economy and survive the transition.
jongjong 3 hours ago [-]
Not only is it not impossible, it's precisely where it's heading.
I think even mass-market companies are going to thrive without customers. They don't need customers. The government will start handing out billion dollar contracts to these companies for doing almost nothing and they're going to focus on investing and the government money is just going to keep going round and round in circles between all the chosen companies.
JimTheMan 4 hours ago [-]
It assumes that people will be meek when they are oppressed. That there won't be a counter movement at all to the rising inequality?
You can already see it now, with the rise of populism and to a lesser extent socialism.
A non-consumption economy will only happen if the masses can be somehow oppressed, or pursuaded to bliss out peacefully.. In the long run of history, I'm going to bet on the masses pulling through.
Thompsonflimsy 15 hours ago [-]
This whole post rests on a basic misunderstanding of economics.
dlev_pika 15 hours ago [-]
Which is?
jaggederest 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jeremysalwen 11 hours ago [-]
Wages could go up, it's just in the form of trillionare paying another trillionare a trillion dollars a day. GDP would be looking rosy!
dlev_pika 10 hours ago [-]
This is kinda what’s been happening for a while -
Wages are decoupled from consumption, and it is increasingly aggregated in the higher income brackets.
Sure, what you describe is usually in the Macro textbooks. However in XXI century USA, Consumption has been detached from ‘wages’ for a while now (“since the 1970s”, ie 2 generations, per https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/)
In reality, the top income brackets are propping up Consumption numbers. This is part of what have become to understand as the ‘K’ shaped economy, together with the speeding up of capital accumulation/concentration.
This article is exactly as annoying as politicians who ascribe everything to the Economy.
skybrian 16 hours ago [-]
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.
monknomo 15 hours ago [-]
I think this mentions that AI Island also has robots than can produce most goods
skybrian 15 hours ago [-]
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?
throwway120385 15 hours ago [-]
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.
skybrian 14 hours ago [-]
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?
pixl97 10 hours ago [-]
The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.
As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.
It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.
whateveracct 14 hours ago [-]
good enough LLMs aren't genies lol
leptons 14 hours ago [-]
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.
whack 13 hours ago [-]
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
jeremysalwen 11 hours ago [-]
I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% less interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply. "Humans will be so rich they will fuck off to other parts of the world and leave gorilla habitat alone" hasn't really panned out so well.
totetsu 13 hours ago [-]
Unless this ASI either way, turns the world into an opencast mine and burns off the atmosphere on the way out..
pixl97 10 hours ago [-]
>They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.
Their servers need energy, their bots need materials, these things come from real ownership of land. There are also things said rich people like, such as beautiful locations. And all of these beautiful locations are filled with ugly stinky people that are more poor than them. At least some of these rich people will want to 'deal' with this problem.
iwintermute 11 hours ago [-]
Pointless economy? Technically Possible!
giacomoforte 5 hours ago [-]
What I do not find plausible is this scenario where AI is so smart it can replace us all, but at the same time somehow still easily controllable and utterly subservient to the ownership class.
beloch 11 hours ago [-]
"Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them."
----------------
This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.
To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
pixl97 10 hours ago [-]
Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.
adalacelove 8 hours ago [-]
Why have the powerful not completely killed the rest of the people?
A. Ethics/Morals
B. Power balance
C. People are a valuable resource
I think we are all a little concerned it is C.
It's a grim thought and I'm optimistic, but the stakes are very high. Reminds me of Solaria (Foundation and Earth, Asimov).
pj_mukh 13 hours ago [-]
Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1].
tl;dr: The most likely scenario is that AI affects us at the scale of the internet. Revolutionary, but nothing that fundamentally gets rid of labor economics (like this article posits).
Im getting really tired of these cloudflare anti-ddos screens. They take forever, often literally. There's another one of these that shows an anime girl, whatever that one is, it's way better.
stult 13 hours ago [-]
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.
applfanboysbgon 13 hours ago [-]
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.
elendilm 14 hours ago [-]
Same here.
HeartStrings 7 hours ago [-]
Pitchforks
mordae 8 hours ago [-]
> Money is an example. Really, what is money? A piece of paper? Some metal? Some number on a computer? Could you put your finger on what money really is, especially in the modern world?
Debt owed to central bank. Enforced by State via taxation and confiscation of property if you do not pay up. People seek it because they need to pay the said taxes and/or believe other people will seek it to pay theirs, including in a foreign territory. Loses value when central bank/State is unable to impose taxation and/or has not much useful work to extract from its subjects.
Recently western States have been captured by socialists, which prompted a reaction of the rich and powerful that eventually made the States unable to issue money and forced them to beg for the very thing they enable on the door fronts of the capitalists, making democracy a second-class economical citizen.
euehe 1 hours ago [-]
“ Debt owed to central bank”
Wrong.
Many of the comments here on economics and finance are so wrong it’s actually hilarious. I need to go wipe my brain clean after reading some of these.
What’s next - fractional reserve banking? Also wrong
sp527 15 hours ago [-]
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.
hurtigioll 15 hours ago [-]
we do not trade with animals, for they have nothing to offer.
AIs will not trade with us, for we have nothing to offer.
bmacho 3 hours ago [-]
Some animals are cute and can simulate human children.
Other animals are capable of some tasks, like dogs searching for drugs, bombs or people, or helping the blind. Most animals however are kept for their bodies: meat, milk, egg, fur, skin.
The movie Matrix explores this idea, humans are kept alive for their bodies. They are not kept in constant suffering at least, as we do with many animals.
sp527 15 hours ago [-]
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.
throw4847285 13 hours ago [-]
Science fiction has melted people's minds.
pixl97 10 hours ago [-]
?but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.
Buwahaha. Jesus Christ, people won't unplug them, half the bastards here would marry them... then defend their AI girlfriend to the death.
No my friend, we won't just unplug the data centers.
muvlon 14 hours ago [-]
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.
sp527 13 hours ago [-]
Data centers are incredibly dense and exposed military targets. This may become relevant in the future.
bethekidyouwant 14 hours ago [-]
They are not self replicating yet…
dismalaf 15 hours ago [-]
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.
fooker 14 hours ago [-]
Paperclip maximizer
stult 13 hours ago [-]
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
bmacho 3 hours ago [-]
Flag the websites you can't access. If enough people flag them the moderators will take them down from the front page.
We need an Amazon for AIs whereby AIs can order other AIs to do particular work for a particular fee, then retrieve the work product, and rate the worker. The worker doesn't have to be limited to AI agents; it can also be a human agent or an any entity. The work can be digital or physical.
11 hours ago [-]
vasco 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
elendilm 14 hours ago [-]
Exactly. The author is a clueless idiot.
Unit327 12 hours ago [-]
"If agi and perfect humanoid robot slaves, then xyz". That's a motherfucking big "if".
ACCount37 6 hours ago [-]
More of a "when" nowadays.
ares623 12 hours ago [-]
Look at this discussion. All this so a bunch of nerds can be allowed to play with their newest toy.
sdevonoes 15 hours ago [-]
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
bayarearefugee 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
12 hours ago [-]
johnsmith1840 13 hours ago [-]
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.
confidantlake 15 hours ago [-]
Damn downvoted to oblivion 3 minutes after you posted this. The bots are out in force on this one.
ggm 14 hours ago [-]
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
bediger4000 15 hours ago [-]
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?
sosomoxie 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bediger4000 10 hours ago [-]
LLM AI won't give them a cancer cure, guaranteed.
sosomoxie 32 minutes ago [-]
They believe it will, which is why they are acting the way they are.
Joel_Mckay 8 hours ago [-]
The top LLM "AI" models were put in a simulated economy, and it showed the most successful models ended up destroying the productivity of the fiscal ecosystem.
Honestly, this blog is pretty silly and the reason is that the blog author is conflating multiple concepts, while failing to have a grasp of basic aspects of human organization (I honestly am at the point where accusing someone of not having a grasp of basic aspects of economics is a meaningless phrase, since mainstream economics is purely mathematical and is devoid of anything grounded in reality or the history of humanity).
What comes before an economy? Self sufficiency aka autark production and consumption. You produce exactly what you will consume. Note that eliminating "consumption" is illogical, since any elimination of "consumption" by necessity also entails the elimination of "production" and since humans are mortal, abstaining from consumption will lead to death. The same applies to any machine that needs energy or maintenance.
"Peopleless economy?" conflates the idea of machines or AI as economic agents and the idea of the rich withdrawing from the public market, by expanding their autarky.
The fallacy here is that you cannot simultaneously withdraw from the market and dominate it. If the rich decide that AI has advanced far enough that they don't need a single human to work under them anymore and they pack up their stuff and teleport a section of earth to Mars or a space colony, where the non-rich people cannot reach them, those rich people have ceded their influence on Earth.
When you play Factorio you build a fully automated ever expanding factory completely without any other people. There is no market economy here, because there is no trading here.
When you play on a Minecraft server with an automation modpack, most people won't play together. In fact, they will start from scratch, because it is more fun that way.
>Those humans are then paid for their services, work, or ideas, and can keep on buying food and housing from the owning class to survive. But guess what: once the machines get the role of producing and conceiving things, those humans are no longer economically necessary.
Again, another fallacy. The humans doing the consumption here are generating the reason for the machines' existence. If you unemploy the consumers, you unemploy the producers, even if the producer is a machine. Now that the rich own a huge pile of machines that they don't need, they will get rid of them and downsize their factory to just what they need for themselves. They will retreat into an autark mode of production.
There's just one issue. People can still exist in the old "obsolete" non-autark mode of production at the loss of productivity. If there are people who need food and the old producers have left the market, new low productivity producers will enter the market to replace them. Hence, the autark mode of production is inherently a cessation of power.
Now the obvious counter argument is that society can devolve back into feudalism where everyone is fighting over land and resources and the only thing that changed is that the peasant class was merely substituted by robots, but this is a completely different topic from what the blog post addresses. "The Economy" in the blog is about trading/employment, not about whose name is written in the land registry for a given plot of land or that there are standing robot armies re-enacting robot feudalism.
>Our world is so perverse, that it should not be impossible for you to imagine that after AI taking over, The Economy relies entirely on virtual transactions between companies with no product or service, that the 'consumption' only refers to powering the AI machines, and everyone else is homeless or dead.
Yet another fallacy. Companies can do useless transactions between each other if they want to for the sake of role playing, but why would they? They can downsize and stop producing things. The blog post here is actually committing the very thing it claims to argue against. It imagines a future that is exactly the same, except for the one thing that is changing. So the blog is critiquing itself for its lack of imagination.
>The implicit assumptions that lead to the conclusion that we are needed for The Economy to keep running, are erroneous. So are most conclusions about The Economy, even when they come from experts: ask ten economists the same question, and you will get ten different answers or predictions.
At this point it feels like the author has a fundamental misunderstanding what an economy is. Machines are built in response to a demand that makes them necessary. In the absence of demand, the machine is idle but still produces costs, which makes it profitable to get rid of it. If there is a single human on the planet you don't need an elaborate agricultural society, you don't need machines, you don't need to hold onto land, you can just live as a hunter gatherer nomad. If you could have a hyper tech machine that grants you the living standard of today, you still wouldn't need to conquer the entire planet, you would leave it as is.
The biggest failure of this blog post is that it fails to actually address the disequilibrium factors. The position it fights against is actually completely logical in an assumed "always in equilibrium" economy. It doesn't mention land as a non-reproducable factor that must be divided among the population or money as a monopoly that you are obligated to use for trading despite its ability to be accumulated. Those two factors can disrupt or are immune to equilibrium, but in both cases if there was a way to build your own substitute land or substitute money, there wouldn't be any problem.
In fact, you could say that the fundamental problem is that wildly different people are sharing the same planet. If every human had their own planet, none of the raised issues would exist.
throw391912321 15 hours ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 15 hours ago [-]
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.
stevenwoo 15 hours ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bigstrat2003 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
BobbyTables2 12 hours ago [-]
Wonder how many read that first sentence thinking it was referring to the current times… (;->
Helloworldboy 15 hours ago [-]
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jplusequalt 15 hours ago [-]
>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.
Helloworldboy 15 hours ago [-]
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confidantlake 15 hours ago [-]
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.
mgc_blackbox 11 hours ago [-]
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cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
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littlexsparkee 11 hours ago [-]
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Patchistry 13 hours ago [-]
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elendilm 14 hours ago [-]
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groos 16 hours ago [-]
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po1nt 15 hours ago [-]
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.
A poor example considering Musk is responsible for a substantial increase in hunger in Africa recently.
johnsmith1840 13 hours ago [-]
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.
po1nt 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not here to defend Elon Musk, but what is the context of this?
A leap of faith is required and sometimes things don't happen the way we expect but it's better than aiming for nothing.
End times are nothing new, it's the historic default mode.
For much of the youth, this is impossible. The permitting and regulatory process for houses is hostile to slow and DIY building so even if you can get cheap land near jobs (you can) you can't do it without predicting 30 years of mortgage payments. The pandemic monetary policy (more recently) and cash-for-clunkers(longer ago) trashed the used car markets. Increased regulation, licensing, insurance requirements and liability made childcare far less affordable. Also in the old days "neglect" was stuff like actually starving your kids to death so if you were broke you could work or do domestic stuff to save money and leave them home or to run around outside without Karen having them snatched by CPS.
Annihilation isn't so worrying, it's the surviving that's scary.
Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.
I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation.
They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_famine_of_1867%E2%80%9...
Perhaps one was/is sometimes a stretch, but starvation and famine were a thing:
> Over two million people died in two famines in France between 1693 and 1710. Both famines were made worse by ongoing wars.[127]
> As late as the 1690s, Scotland experienced famine which reduced the population of parts of Scotland by at least 15%.[128]
> The Great Famine of 1695–1697 may have killed a third of the Finnish population.[129] and roughly 10% of Norway's population.[130]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#17th_century
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695–1697
But even a single year is not unreasonable:
> The Great Famine, which lasted from 1770 until 1771, killed about one tenth of Czech lands' population, or 250,000 inhabitants, and radicalised countrysides leading to peasant uprisings.[135]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#18th_century
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famines_in_Czech_lands
Society today still doesn't really do dick to help parents but not only that they've built unprecedented apparatus around jailing, ridiculing, condemning, and harassing parents for any perceived weaknesses in their strategy including failing to foresee their financial situation decades into the future.
I don't spend much time worrying about what I'll do for my kids if the nuclear apocalypse happens. I would still have kids if it was 90% chance of the apocolypse, whereas I'd probably not have kids if there were a 30% chance I make just enough to survive but not so much I can pay child support and I sit in a jail cell while everyone around me does nothing but rags on me for being a deadbeat and failure of a father.
Note: Also, except for the first few years, having kids made your situation less rather than more precarious in the agrarian age
There isn't some vast conspiracy. But generally it takes a certain kind of person to crave that type of wealth and power. So they tend to all pull in the same direction to keep and build upon said wealth/power. Thus can be viewed as collectively working towards the same nefarious state of things.
And the unpredictability actually has a name and it is "flooding the zone".
It's like walking in the desert assuming you will reach water soon because you are really thirsty. Nature doesn't care about human needs and will allow you to die of thirst.
It's like having a caravan in which every oasis you pass you only get a miniscule amount of water to refill.
While another caravan of one, that you never see or interact with directly gets to gorge on the oasis... While simultaneously filling up extra barrels of its water to bring back home.
You don't know where this caravan of one is based nor do you ever see them... But everytime you go by the oasis it is noticeably worse for wear.
The only way free will is possible is that we are oblivious to the future.
Good luck with your choices, and your life!
We are doomed because we can predict the sun will rise tomorrow?
We are doomed because we can predict the weather 7-10 days out with reasonable accuracy?
We are doomed because we can predict the climate change based on models?
We are doomed because with our knowledge of physics we can predict the outcome of many events?
It's the realization in china that their efforts will never amount to meaningful rewards, hence they scale down the effort to what's absolutely necessary for survival. Living without a home and only working maybe 1 day a week to get enough food to not die. Equivalent in Europe would be to just be homeless and get by on social security, US probably getting by on food stamps.
What you see here is subtly different: they see the sword of damocles. Whatever they may do, the end may come at any point and they have no way to influence it.
But to go back to the initial question of what to do: you ignore it. You cannot do anything about it, hence you can only gamble that it doesn't manifest and work under that assumption. If it does manifest youre fucked anyway. But if it doesn't, you're gucci
I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that no matter what you decide, how you act, bigger phenomena than you is the only thing that matters?
Most people thinking about predicting the future are asking for either more details which we cannot give, but the trend is good enough and nobody thinks about it.
Hell, some of the largest civilization upheavals and collapses were due to localized climate disruptions (sometimes planet wide). Volcano in place (a) erupted and the temperature dropped enough to impact growing cycles, etc
Not so many generations ago parents might not know if they’d survive to see their children reach adulthood (or if their children would survive, or if they’d be infertile, or die during childbirth). My parents are boomers who ended up doing well, but had to buy a house at a 17% interest rate and low wages not knowing if that was a smart or dumb move. The current generation face huge land values (but have better medicine and moderate interest rates). Who would you trade places with, without the benefit of hindsight?
High taxes lead to reinvestment.
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 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
For many millennials and younger working people a huge bulk of income is taken up by housing. There's also a cliff edge of jobs when you transition from full time to part time, it's only rarely possible to find part time work which pays enough to sustain living costs.
This leads to a situation in which people have to work full time in order to meet basic conditions of living and many consumer items like TVs and streaming subscriptions can be had at prices which are negligible compared to their fundamental living costs.
I wouldn't choose most of the above either, which is why I have a full time job.
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.
John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do.
Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive.
It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved.
It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.
This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable":
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/ke...
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
A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.
Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.
I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.
Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.
Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)
I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost
You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.
You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.
> but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
Trump was elected twice, the voters are brain dead cattle anyways
> BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago
At what scale? People could go to the US in 1700 too, it doesn't mean that commercial airlines are sustainable at ANY rate
Let us not even go deeper to the Age of Sail. Large-scale trade and consumption of sugar, tobacco and cotton fueled slavery operations from Virginia down to Brazil, long before a lightbulb was even a thing.
Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.
In the extremes, 1 hour weekly is probably too little and 100 hours weekly is excessive. But given how almost the entire world has converged to approx. 40 on average, I'd be surprised if it was very different from 40.
Yes, this may change with robots and AI.
At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?
0. https://www.paulgraham.com/brandage.html
While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.
If your job involves network connectivity and SSH, satellite Internet would allow you to do your job on your yacht where ever it happens to be, even in the middle of an ocean.
James Hamilton, Senior Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, [1] was doing this 15+ years ago as he motored around the world in a Nordhavn 52 [2] with his wife:
* https://mvdirona.com/2009/06/remote-data-communication-costs...
* https://mvdirona.com/2015/08/communications-at-sea/
* https://mvdirona.com/2018/03/kvh-v7-hts-twice-the-speed-more...
[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/
[2] https://mvdirona.com/dirona/
Sounds like a poshy neighborhood colonized by expats. I mean, I do share the values but it's definitely a luxury and entitled position (with its own consequences on the rest of the locals sharing the same city)
Handwaving away constraints on production on physical goods because of advances in code generation is a new one.
African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.
Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/
Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
And a lot of people in the US can't afford hospitals or antibiotics today.
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.
It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.
Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.
This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids.
People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short.
Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.
I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice.
I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.
I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.
It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week.
Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.
What about never working for 2billion% more?
You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
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
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.
https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s
Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.
It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.
People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.
Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.
Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.
No doubt there's problematic regulations like exclusionary zoning laws. But you can't say that these regulations are so binding that there is no choice and no expression of preferences as opposed to needs in their choices. Lots of homes still have unmandated second floors, basements, bathrooms, and square footage.
The human brain is great at (ir)rationalizing wants as needs. If you want to live in a nice place in a high-cost of living city, that's a want, not a need.
100%. Most people can be very happy with very low consumption. What people want is not to work. The happiest time in my life was when I was earning a measily $40K per year in passive income from crypto and didn't work. It was the lowest salary I ever had, least I ever consumed and happiest I'd ever been. The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working. If you don't work, you don't need to consume anywhere near as much. When my wife quit her job 10 years ago, our rate of savings stayed the same because we spent less and quality of life went up significantly for both of us.
Anyone who enjoys working is delusional. What they call work is not work; they're living in a parallel reality where the economy rewards them for playing the big boss and sitting on their asses and watching their money compound... Everything they're doing is meaningless; it only serves as a narrative device to justify the handouts that they'd be getting regardless. Just look at Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; he probably made more money after he resigned from the CEO role. It's incredible really when you look at Microsoft's product offerings these days; even Bill Gates knew to dump MSFT and now has less money than Ballmer. It's like the economy punishes people for having common sense.
I don't think anyone is saying that it wouldn't be great if we didn't have to work to survive and thrive. What they are saying is, based on current trends, we are more heading for one of those scifi dystopias than star trek.
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.
If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more.
Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.
In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.
Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.
In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.
Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.
I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.
If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.
Not letting any of this happen would be a good idea. Really maybe don't build the Torment Nexus.
That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners first.
This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"
When we hit AGI and the robots rise up against us. Make sure you delete this post.
(And conversely, universal paperclip is a great illustration that an autonomous agent doesn't need to achieve human-like intelligence to “rise” against us)
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.
and you might discard the first one because of the second one.
Nick Land spoiler: "what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."
Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment.
You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on.
You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters.
You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either.
You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips.
You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house.
Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm.
You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work.
A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is.
>Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
That sounds a whole lot like consumption to me.
What fuels the economy, for now, is human work. Being a consumer simply means that you are heavily incentivised to take part (by working).
If machines can do the same or better, whoever owns them will end-up seeing unproductive humans as dangerous and wasteful bloat.
It won’t be a life of infinite leisure if you don’t own machines.
Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes.
That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy"
Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.
You could replace AI with Advanced Education or Automation or Transhumanism really and get the same result, but I don't think there is really a "solution" beyond either staying as pets or catching up as an individual.
But at the same time, even if the rich become completely autonomous to the rest in some walled enclave, that would just resolve to the unemployed all just creating their own parallel economy again. You might loose much of the inheritance of wealth and infrastructure from the preceding civilization, but then again the preceding civilization's own norms that legacy was owned by the rich, so it's just returning back to basics.
If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
Why did he decide to make these predictions if his ideas supposedly have no bearing on how predictions are created?
Does economics no longer even have the pretense of being a science, which by its very nature exists to make testable predictions?
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.
Love to see you mix unsubstantiated vitriol with overt lies like this.
I remember first going to a party at an Economics students house 20 years ago, and thinking they all seemed like they were in a cult. Wasn't until fairly recently I figured out it was from propaganda.
[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network
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"
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?
I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.
What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.
SWEs I think are more susceptible to this since as you say we often dip in many areas and industries. No, we are not actual SMEs and proper experts (barring exceptions of course, but in any case we usually have a specific view on domain, while proper experts understand many/all views).
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.
Did anyone ever keep track of how often economists turn out to be right about anything? I didn't, but have the feeling that it isn't much better than flipping a coin.
> An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM
If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
> If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
It may not have been a nasty name but damn that was brutal.
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.
> One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group
There doesn't have to be a fully cohesive group of an entire class for there to be negative consequences for the non-members of that class. The members also don't have to be cohesive or aligned at first, but they will tend to align on issues that threaten their position.
For example, we have historically seen that the incumbent elites tend to be anti-socialist/-communist, because their relative position and power are threatened, even if their populations and some (aspiring) elites are remotely pro-socialist. And because the coercive power of incumbents is often much higher than the power of some populace or aspirants (i.e., they have more to offer to those who hold coercive power), they will tend to succeed in pushing against the majority.
The entire history of the US, UK, Germany, France, Russia (etc.) is full of such examples.
> that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy.
It doesn't have to be hermetically sealed to exclude certain populations.
On a global level, many countries don't trade with each other, and their economies are doing fine. Hard sanctions and cold wars even make this intentional, rather than a product of "we don't have anything to offer to each other".
On a local level, most people don't interact with the "homeless"/unhoused, and the latter often don't have much to offer to the former. Most Western countries don't need to hermetically separate the rich from the rest, but if you look at Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia or even the US, gated communities are common in some areas. Most of the rest outside don't have much to offer to those inside.
Taken together: if it's plausible, and we don't know how probable it may be, we may want to figure that out, instead of hoping it's not probable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:
> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.
The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?
I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.
Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.
But that's still not "abundance for all".
Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population. At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done. At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison. The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you.
Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison Population: how did you say we can get them?
A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots.
Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.
It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work.
They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.
But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.
Government will, among other things, oversee that the needs of the people are well served by these robots.
Taxes is human labor dedicated to the maintenance of state.
I think it is naive to think that once humans are not needed they will magically be fed by the machines.
At least democracies have elections and that is a big difference.
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?
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.
All these programs poll above majorities in the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too.
If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people."
It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions.
Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)?
People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.
[1] 65% https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-al...
[2] 82% https://www.ffyf.org/2026/01/28/new-national-poll-shows-stro...
[3] 60% https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/7/23863415/polls-support-un...
[4] 60% https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/11/democrats...
[5] 60 https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cwcp-job-guarantee-poll
You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.
Tell me, how many elites have a nuclear weapon.
Yes, but how it changes depends entirely on who owns the robots.
There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, and huge evidence that self-centered wealthy billionaires (and trillionaires!) will own them.
In such a case, the response to "the robots will make everything" isn't "so give it away to the people for free! :-)". It's "so what do I need all these stupid people for? make killbots to keep them away from my fully-automated luxury oligarchy compound!"
But that is up to the people and their governments to decide. You seem to miss the fact that governments are made by people and for the people, and not made by the billionaires. Even a billionaire have a single vote.
Government can outlaw the private ownership of combat autonomous robots if that is what the people want.
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.
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.
Governments are no longer allowed to print money. Do you think they will be allowed to build unlimited supply of robots? You are funny.
All the robot factories will belong to rich and we will have to _beg_ to have some measly allocation _while_ we feed the police that prevents us from just taking them.
And politicians will mostly just say this is _inevitable_ for some reason or other.
If that has not happened already then why do you think so pessimistically?
If you permit me to reference the blog post:
>It is a well attested fact that human logic is far from flawless. We are all victims of our biases, emotions, and equally importantly, our implicit assumptions. Just like in mathematics, where all our theorems stem from sets of axioms, so do our beliefs stem from assumptions. But unlike in mathematics, where the axioms are concrete, explicit, and shaped by natural observations, the human logic's axioms are more abstract, implicit, and shaped by our knowledge and our cultural background.
You're making an implicit assumption that all land is owned by people who want to deprive you of the land and its products. You can't make the argument that a "rich person" is holding onto the land and eating all of the food produced by it, so it would be unfair for the "rich person" to give you access to the food.
The underlying problem here is access to land and this is an independent concern from "The Economy".
>Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.
Ok so you mentioned it, but this means we are no longer talking about the machines. In fact the presence or absence of machines is a completely irrelevant factor here. If you can get your hands on the machines, it turns into a non issue.
And as mentioned above, if you are exclusively producing for yourself, you don't need that much land, hence the people without land are in the right if they demand to get some of it. The very argument you made is that the people with the machines are better stewards of the land, but this logic only makes sense in the presence of them producing for an outside consumer. If they just hold onto the land and do nothing with it, their hypothetical productivity increase is worth nothing compared to the very real zero yield they produce by doing nothing. Even an inefficient production process has higher absolute productivity than doing nothing.
Take it one step further. From the perspective of the low productivity producers the land is very valuable and from the perspective of the high productivity autark producer, the land is worth very little. If the autark producer wants to role play a feudalist and puts an army of killer robots there, he would be expending a lot of resources for something that the producer doesn't consider valuable. Since the low productivity producers consider the land more valuable, their military budget per acre is actually higher.
So now the second underlying assumption is that the landless people are defeated by the robot army of the landed people. I hope you see where this is going. It's not about economics at this point anymore. It's some weird power fantasy where some group of people always wins and another group of people always loses.
In other words, a planned economy
Might want to think that through again. I recommend this SG Atlantis episode: https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Poisoning_the_Well
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"
And that's communist. I don't understand why nobody seem to see the irony or the miscategorization. This isn't to be critical of this comment, but my righteousness obsessed mind says that people pushing for the dual-layer system where few controls classical economy without humans and rest using their own systems needs to be relabeled from capitalist to proto-Soviet style totalitarian anarcho-Communist.
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?
No space for this human here, I guess.
Edit after reading through this on a seperate device that hasn't been banned from most of cloudflare: I think this guy is vastly underestimating the amount of humans that are still in the production loop of almost every supply chain.
Consider the humble through-hole LED. A product that surely has reached near the absolute peak of production line optimization, being an almost purely fungible product who's form factor will never change. They are still manually put together by humans. A sheet of semiconductor diodes is separated with a manually operated machine for human access. the prongs are placed into a jig by hand, so that a semi-automated machine can place each diode onto the correct leg. Then the jig is placed, again by hand, into position for the injection molded plastic dome.
It's not just one long automated pipeline that has a couple of hoppers for raw materials at one end and finished LEDs at the other. real human beings are still involved at every step of the process. If we can't achieve end-to-end automation for something as dead simple as the humble through-hole LED, after almost 50 years of process improvement? Technology will never fully remove the human from the economy.
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.
There is growth, it might not be where you are, or it might be superimposed with other effects for you.
* via government subsidies
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?
Nature abhors a vacuum and that principle extends to power vacuums.
It’s fun to speculate on a sci-fi level, but I don’t think the long term endgame is worth losing any sleep over yet
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.
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.
I mean, there may be some things certain groups specialize in, like augmented obedient humans with 15 titties that these people trade back and forth.
But here's the thing, what if they don't need to trade anything? You get to be a nation unto yourself (and your slaves).
The particular problem we have is without something for 'labor' to do in the future the world we have now breaks.
It’s just working better for a few of them right now than it historically has.
Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.
the economy needs to get a whole lot better before i would even consider something like this looking true. human demands are wildly elastic, which is why we’re not all farmers riding around in horse drawn carriages still.
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.
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.
This timeline is straight ass.
Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?
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?
In a sense all this communication is "for somebody". But do you know all the communication your laptop is doing? Do you really claim it is all for you, or all for your benefit? Or is it just something the laptop does that isn't really for anyone in particular?
Hmm, why would anyone add comms to a laptop if there wasn’t some benefactor in some way? The way I see it is that it’s either benefiting me or benefiting the company which ends up benefiting some individuals (and sometimes me again).
> 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.
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.
>But these bytes are in service of a human?
I mean, lets say that 99.9% of all traffic on the net was by one person running an AI to get them rich, we'd call that traffic 'in service of a human' by your set of rules but it does kind of break historically how pretty much all communication in history worked until we started controlling stuff with wires and radios. That is, one person with one prompt can cause a hell of a lot of communication now.
And we're not even at the point of AGI/ASI yet. That's when some other agent with their non-human goals can start doing things.
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
If the world population hits a ceiling (or starts to shrink), and corporations get more massive - reaching every citizen on earth, how can they continue to grow?
Assuming the typical pathways of acquisition/merger have been exhausted. Now you're looking at a world of abundance, and corporations must invent ways to generate demand.
So what if, robots could be state owned and be treated as a special class of robot citizens? They could earn a wage (or some kind of credits) and spend them for benefits like upgrades or repairs. Not just humanoids, all robots. With this, one could essentially create infinite demand-supply channels.
Its not going to happen in my lifetime, that's sure but its a nice academic what-if discussion.
well, shit. here we go again.
like, what even is consciousness and all that :s sorry, just thought i'd share lol
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.
The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.
</doomer>
FTFY
Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
Because there are a few winners who are happy to collectively monopolize the market - e.g RAM - nobody is increasing production, China is blocked from the market by sanctions and tariffs, the rest are more than happy to ask for a 1000% more than just a few years ago. Why would they do anything else - it's absolutely not in their interest for the prices to come down.
> There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI.
There isn't and won't be any "intense competition" - nobody can compete without hardware and it's now monopolized and affordable only to a token few.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
In the light of the current reality, this can only be classified as hallucinations. Actually, previously commoditized markets have become inaccessible and the trend is the exact opposite of what you're saying. It's bizarre to read naked assertions, which are not only without evidence but with all evidence pointing to the opposite.
> That competition is going to bring down costs for everything.
Back to reality, a new Teddy Roosevelt isn't going to magically reappear, not in either of the two parties. Imagine the world without him... we're almost there.
The underlying assumption here is that there is always something established players won't try to buy out new companies or use their existing capital to screw over others
> The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies
Right now that is not the case. Look at the PC industry. I worry for the autonomy of a consumer in the future. It's probably going to be something like here is your rental thin client PC with agents on a monthly rental plan. What's that? you want to build a game with your own gpu? No no. A consumer grade gpu does not make sense in this day and age. Just ask the agent to build your game. We need the gpu compute for better things
Overall if we want to keep this society economy we are use to with AI in the picture ... we need to thrive off of AI .. not just AI thriving off our backs and destroying the society we know.
Wrote about my idea how to get us all paid from the content we create daily last week on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
Though we could all just go back to living off the land...
I have lawyer agent x10 better than yours in a civil matter. Guess who wins. What value is second best lawyer?
Some of you have never spent any time in a courtroom and it shows.
Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets.
I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.
> Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.
I think this is already the case.
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.
They can give them drones to aim at - enjoy your serfdom, let the AI tell you how to live your best life, don’t worry and don’t step out of the walled garden
Where do these few acquire all their wealth?
What happens when these remaining few need to compete?
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 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
Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them.
You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase with no injection of money at all.
I was explaining that money is irrelevant and so are the jobless masses. Someone owns the factories, and that person is the one who is relevant here. They of course need to be convinced, by money or other means, but the jobless masses are only relevant to the extent that they own and control wealth; since they are jobless, they probably have very little ownership or control.
You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
Whoa there internet friend! I don't think I said anything about wealth concentration not being a trend. I'm just talking about AI. I'm still waiting for someone to explain coherent, undeniable watertight reasons that we're on a one-way track that goes from AI companies to infinite money glitch or robot death factories. I've already made my arguments against why I don't think it will happen before[0][1]
Maybe the argument is some already-rich fella with magic robot factories will have everything they will ever need, so they brush away all of humanity like an unsightly bit of dandruff on their shoulder with their kill bot drone army.
I guess if you squint at it long enough, that kinda sounds plausible. In the same way someone could press a giant red nuke button and have us all wiped out like a Terminator movie. But it's making a lot of fantastic assumptions without a lot of concreteness. That is, many people seem to be claiming "this is the AI endgame" rather than seeing other possibilities that aren't so ridiculously cynical or nihilistic with leaky abstractions
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48330434
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966936
They could kill everyone, so aren't you glad they decided to open a soup kitchen instead? Here, have some UBI. Of course, it's not quite "universal" yet, so you'll have to sell your house to make it under the means test. A local firm, owned by a national private equity company, forming part of an international portfolio fund, making up an ETF owned mostly by Anthropic investors, will be happy to buy that bit of real estate. Oh, you wrote that on social media? I'm afraid you're not the kind of tenant we're looking for.
This is basically how life already works for people who aren't capable of holding down a job today. I don't think it's ridiculously cynical or nihilistic to extrapolate from the available data and assume it's going to suck once working people have no bargaining power other than asking politely.
Governments and society is what we make to avoid that sort of anarchy, but if certain entities become more powerful than the these institutions, then they can just take over whatever they want
The idea of capitalism only really makes sense when wealth is reasonably distributed such that there is still reasonable competition in both the marketplace and control of the state.
The next thing is the idea of money really does break down once you get automation without people. If you have said automation and enough materials to get going you can start increasing your 'wealth' in things like factories/robots/data where the now unemployed stop having any means to make more money. Hence you'll start buying up properties from people that are going bankrupt.
Same reason.
Call it 'basic income' if that helps.
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.
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.
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!
Now stop and imagine what kind of society the rich people you know and hear of would want to live in?
Do they want a bunch of poors around? Of course not. Do they want to give the money so they are not poor? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said poor people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of dumb people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them education so they are not dumb? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said dumb people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of ugly people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them plastic surgery, genetic manipulation so they are not ugly? Of course not. Would many of them 'erase' said ugly people. History says yes.
There are a number of people that already think that the Earths population should be culled back to a few million people. Giving people that believe this power seems to be a really good way to cause a genocide.
them rioting is a benefit, so you can justify sending in occupation forces to get rid of some
this is well practiced stuff in the west bank
Without income or savings, people can't afford houses. How would they pay the property taxes? Can't maintain the house. The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes. This happens all the time. Nobody swoops in and saves those people.
Also, hang on. Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Sold to whom? Isn’t the argument that no one will have money? There are approximately as many houses in the US as there are households. We are not going to see all the houses empty and all the households homeless. Maybe the people who are currently buying at a time when home values are historically high will be shafted. But those houses will not end up empty.
> Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Reading comprehension. These are the two relevant statements - speaking of the average:
> we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
and speaking of HN denizens:
> average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
... do you remember 2008? Or no? That was a tiny blip.
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
all those "heroes" and "essential workers" like people running the till at grocery stores should be getting paid a ton
> 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.
So how (in this admittedly doomsday scenario that I hope won't come to pass) will a human-based society be able function?
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.
Aside from the income, employment also has a way of occupying one’s time. Without that, one would often spend additional funds on various forms of entertainment (books, movies, crafts, travel, etc.)…
I’m also envisioning an age of abundance. It’s not just your basic necessities of life met. If you have essentially free, electricity and all labor done by robots, that’s not an impossible thing to foresee.
I also think for a large group of people child rearing will take up a huge chunk of their time with many more children being born now that all of the unenviable parts of raising a child can be outsourced to robots.
Honestly, yes, it does sound like fantastical utopian thinking, but I don’t think you have to make that many leaps to get there.
The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide.
Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.
It is harder that just blowing stuff up, but when one side is using killer robots and other advanced electronics tech it doesn't seem like much effort in comparison. We already see criminal elements making guns and drugs and narco submarines, a fast explosive and magnets doesn't seem beyond reach to me.
the fact that EMP blasts are not used in Ukraine, by both sides, to defend against drones also shows its not such a good idea
It's a supreme delusion that it can't. Military tech isn't in the 19th century anymore.
- what powers the robots? How is this power source maintained?
- when a robot is damaged, how is it repaired and where do the raw materials come from?
- when a robot simply doesn't work properly, who assesses the issue and resolves it?
- with 99% of the world population presumably starving to death, what is stopping them from overthrowing whoever is starving them to death?
- it is repaired by robots using resources mined or reclaimed by robots.
- you guessed it, robots.
- robots with weapons.
If we actually want to prevent this doomsday scenario, I don't think it's wise to bet on "robots will never be able to do X".
- same as above
- ditto
- a bit skynet, but it will still require humans in the loop. This is the least whacky though as it actually exists
Eventually being the key concept here. No doubt we'll automate a bunch of stuff, but not at this pace. The robots aren't good enough yet. General purpose robots are even further away.
For the foreseeable, you will still need wage slaves
In the last 1-2 years I see more and more people mentioning guillotines, but I think very soon that won't be an opion anymore.
The Rich will be able to leave the mainlands, protect themselves, and let everyone else be controlled by robot police, and suffer. Maybe if there's something the Rich absolutely need from the mainlands (what?) then they can let everyone else compete with each other to serve the Rich to ease their shitty life a little.
In the past such societies needed a lot of people to serve the Rich, and to oppress everyone else, and it wasn't that sustainable, revolutions could happen. Very soon the Rich won't need anyone in this system, they will own the means of production by robots (no strikes), and the means of oppression, also by robots.
This is what I see when I look ahead. (BTW the US picking fights when they are the bad guys will result US companies necessarily having to turn to private/robot armies to protect "their property".)
Maybe I am wrong and this won't happen even if we do nothing. However I'd feel safer if we started to take away the unimaginable riches from the Rich, and started to empower the government, which is at least in theory controlled by the majority of the citizens.
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.
I don't really understand the comments (apparently) denying the basic logic of this scenario (maybe the article is so confusing that they, or I, am wrong about what it's trying to say). IMO the only real question is how close current technology is to achieving this scenario.
As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down.
The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy.
This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune.
Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No.
There
Unless the overlords are willing to implement UBI, they can't realistically cut 50% of the workforce from the economy and survive the transition.
I think even mass-market companies are going to thrive without customers. They don't need customers. The government will start handing out billion dollar contracts to these companies for doing almost nothing and they're going to focus on investing and the government money is just going to keep going round and round in circles between all the chosen companies.
You can already see it now, with the rise of populism and to a lesser extent socialism.
A non-consumption economy will only happen if the masses can be somehow oppressed, or pursuaded to bliss out peacefully.. In the long run of history, I'm going to bet on the masses pulling through.
(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.
Wages are decoupled from consumption, and it is increasingly aggregated in the higher income brackets.
This is the ‘K’ economy.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...
In reality, the top income brackets are propping up Consumption numbers. This is part of what have become to understand as the ‘K’ shaped economy, together with the speeding up of capital accumulation/concentration.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...
Edits for clarity
ya...
* 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.
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?
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.
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?
As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.
It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.
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
See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.
Their servers need energy, their bots need materials, these things come from real ownership of land. There are also things said rich people like, such as beautiful locations. And all of these beautiful locations are filled with ugly stinky people that are more poor than them. At least some of these rich people will want to 'deal' with this problem.
----------------
This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.
To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
A. Ethics/Morals B. Power balance C. People are a valuable resource
I think we are all a little concerned it is C.
It's a grim thought and I'm optimistic, but the stakes are very high. Reminds me of Solaria (Foundation and Earth, Asimov).
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
Debt owed to central bank. Enforced by State via taxation and confiscation of property if you do not pay up. People seek it because they need to pay the said taxes and/or believe other people will seek it to pay theirs, including in a foreign territory. Loses value when central bank/State is unable to impose taxation and/or has not much useful work to extract from its subjects.
Recently western States have been captured by socialists, which prompted a reaction of the rich and powerful that eventually made the States unable to issue money and forced them to beg for the very thing they enable on the door fronts of the capitalists, making democracy a second-class economical citizen.
Wrong.
Many of the comments here on economics and finance are so wrong it’s actually hilarious. I need to go wipe my brain clean after reading some of these.
What’s next - fractional reserve banking? Also 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 will not trade with us, for we have nothing to offer.
Other animals are capable of some tasks, like dogs searching for drugs, bombs or people, or helping the blind. Most animals however are kept for their bodies: meat, milk, egg, fur, skin.
The movie Matrix explores this idea, humans are kept alive for their bodies. They are not kept in constant suffering at least, as we do with many animals.
Buwahaha. Jesus Christ, people won't unplug them, half the bastards here would marry them... then defend their AI girlfriend to the death.
No my friend, we won't just unplug the data centers.
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.
https://pastebox.io/paste/ZtZHQETZcjdh
https://pastes.io/OZqRw8jT
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.
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.
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.
I mean this has a lot of "Pooh! that's not honey, thats SOCIALISM" in it
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 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUekLTqV1ME
"If not [cult], why [cult] shaped?" lol =3
What comes before an economy? Self sufficiency aka autark production and consumption. You produce exactly what you will consume. Note that eliminating "consumption" is illogical, since any elimination of "consumption" by necessity also entails the elimination of "production" and since humans are mortal, abstaining from consumption will lead to death. The same applies to any machine that needs energy or maintenance.
"Peopleless economy?" conflates the idea of machines or AI as economic agents and the idea of the rich withdrawing from the public market, by expanding their autarky.
The fallacy here is that you cannot simultaneously withdraw from the market and dominate it. If the rich decide that AI has advanced far enough that they don't need a single human to work under them anymore and they pack up their stuff and teleport a section of earth to Mars or a space colony, where the non-rich people cannot reach them, those rich people have ceded their influence on Earth.
When you play Factorio you build a fully automated ever expanding factory completely without any other people. There is no market economy here, because there is no trading here.
When you play on a Minecraft server with an automation modpack, most people won't play together. In fact, they will start from scratch, because it is more fun that way.
>Those humans are then paid for their services, work, or ideas, and can keep on buying food and housing from the owning class to survive. But guess what: once the machines get the role of producing and conceiving things, those humans are no longer economically necessary.
Again, another fallacy. The humans doing the consumption here are generating the reason for the machines' existence. If you unemploy the consumers, you unemploy the producers, even if the producer is a machine. Now that the rich own a huge pile of machines that they don't need, they will get rid of them and downsize their factory to just what they need for themselves. They will retreat into an autark mode of production.
There's just one issue. People can still exist in the old "obsolete" non-autark mode of production at the loss of productivity. If there are people who need food and the old producers have left the market, new low productivity producers will enter the market to replace them. Hence, the autark mode of production is inherently a cessation of power.
Now the obvious counter argument is that society can devolve back into feudalism where everyone is fighting over land and resources and the only thing that changed is that the peasant class was merely substituted by robots, but this is a completely different topic from what the blog post addresses. "The Economy" in the blog is about trading/employment, not about whose name is written in the land registry for a given plot of land or that there are standing robot armies re-enacting robot feudalism.
>Our world is so perverse, that it should not be impossible for you to imagine that after AI taking over, The Economy relies entirely on virtual transactions between companies with no product or service, that the 'consumption' only refers to powering the AI machines, and everyone else is homeless or dead.
Yet another fallacy. Companies can do useless transactions between each other if they want to for the sake of role playing, but why would they? They can downsize and stop producing things. The blog post here is actually committing the very thing it claims to argue against. It imagines a future that is exactly the same, except for the one thing that is changing. So the blog is critiquing itself for its lack of imagination.
>The implicit assumptions that lead to the conclusion that we are needed for The Economy to keep running, are erroneous. So are most conclusions about The Economy, even when they come from experts: ask ten economists the same question, and you will get ten different answers or predictions.
At this point it feels like the author has a fundamental misunderstanding what an economy is. Machines are built in response to a demand that makes them necessary. In the absence of demand, the machine is idle but still produces costs, which makes it profitable to get rid of it. If there is a single human on the planet you don't need an elaborate agricultural society, you don't need machines, you don't need to hold onto land, you can just live as a hunter gatherer nomad. If you could have a hyper tech machine that grants you the living standard of today, you still wouldn't need to conquer the entire planet, you would leave it as is.
The biggest failure of this blog post is that it fails to actually address the disequilibrium factors. The position it fights against is actually completely logical in an assumed "always in equilibrium" economy. It doesn't mention land as a non-reproducable factor that must be divided among the population or money as a monopoly that you are obligated to use for trading despite its ability to be accumulated. Those two factors can disrupt or are immune to equilibrium, but in both cases if there was a way to build your own substitute land or substitute money, there wouldn't be any problem.
In fact, you could say that the fundamental problem is that wildly different people are sharing the same planet. If every human had their own planet, none of the raised issues would exist.
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.
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.
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.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchange-not-zero-sum-game
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.