It’s an economic fallacy that a group of people would get “locked out” of the economy.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.<p>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.<p>Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.<p>> 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.<p>Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?<p>> 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.<p>This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.
>Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need..<p>How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?<p>>Who owns the robots though..<p>I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
> Isn't that the idea?<p>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%:<p>> 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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.<p>But that's still not "abundance for all".
It is never really “for free”.<p>It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work.<p>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.<p>No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.
>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.<p>But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
Otherwise you could say that humans are working for free as well, as they can cultivate their own food and even build themselves by making babies.
Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.
> How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?<p>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?<p>> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.<p>Taxes from what?
>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?<p>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.<p>>Taxes from what..<p>Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.
The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5].<p>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.<p>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."<p>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.<p>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)?<p>People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.<p>[1] 65% <a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-all-is-popular-even-when-put-up-against-attacks" rel="nofollow">https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-al...</a><p>[2] 82% <a href="https://www.ffyf.org/2026/01/28/new-national-poll-shows-strong-bipartisan-support-for-federal-child-care-programs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ffyf.org/2026/01/28/new-national-poll-shows-stro...</a><p>[3] 60% <a href="https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/7/23863415/polls-support-universal-free-school-meals-breakfast-lunch-students/" rel="nofollow">https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/7/23863415/polls-support-un...</a><p>[4] 60% <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/11/democrats-overwhelmingly-favor-free-college-tuition-while-republicans-are-divided-by-age-education/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/11/democrats...</a><p>[5] 60 <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cwcp-job-guarantee-poll" rel="nofollow">https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cwcp-job-guarantee-poll</a>
>but you have to pay for the privilege too...<p>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.<p>>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.<p>Tell me, how many elites have a nuclear weapon.
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.<p>As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
> 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked.<p>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.<p>> All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.<p>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).<p>> 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.<p>A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.
The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.
Figuring out what to produce and how to allocate resources are algorithmically hard problems, even if you know people’s valuation functions. Without some kind of market mechanism to partially reveal valuations it is very difficult indeed. AI is not magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle on your problems to make them go away.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.<p>In other words, a planned economy
Always impressive how smoothly complex constraints vanish in these models.
Or, what the billionaires are actually thinking, remove entire swathes of the population from the equation.<p>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?"<p>Well, they wouldn't be billionaires if they were reasonable so here we are.<p>As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a billionaire"
>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.<p>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 <i>just fine</i>.<p>>ou and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.<p>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?
The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.<p>This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.
> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.<p>The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more<p>> 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.<p>There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions
> Everyone wants more<p>Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.
Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too.<p>For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat<p>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
Thatched roofs are an expensive art installation compared to many other types
Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.<p>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.
Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade.<p>African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.<p>Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: <a href="https://www.africathatch.co.za/" rel="nofollow">https://www.africathatch.co.za/</a><p>Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
I’m talking about how many people lived in the past<p>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
That's still wanting more: more free time.<p>You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
In theory in a robot economy you'll have 100% of the food and shelter you need to some standard, hopefully a decent one. The particular issue with how the world currently is is some people have 60% of their food and shelter while other people have 30000%
> That's still wanting more: more free time.<p>But this is working <i>less</i> to have more free time.<p>> You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.<p>Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want.<p>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
That's assuming all of your current pay is going to necessities - salaries here pay well in excess provided your 'wants' are few, you can cover the things that matter (housing, food, etc) and get your time back.
Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.
That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think
Pertinent section from Rules for Rulers<p><a href="https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s</a>
Physics, or ... capital.<p>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.<p>Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.
No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.<p>This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"
> 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.<p>In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.
I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans.<p>Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.
Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.
I have not, but I am curious.<p>I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.
The important question is, who has power in such an economy?<p>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.<p>Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.<p>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 you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy.<p>If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
Just remember that the US purged left-leaning economists during the cold war and the field re-grew under intense think-tank incentives towards the economic right, so if you think labor/capital dynamics might be important to the AI revolution you really ought to balance your "random" sampling of US economists with some Piketty (Atkinson, Stiglitz, Zucman -- but in an era where reading even one book is considered a herculean feat of focus, "Capital in the Twenty First Century" by Piketty is the canonical pick).
Piketty is just a marxist flailing around, backfilling data to fit his belief that communism is the solution for every problem. He's been spectacularly wrong in his predictions so far, for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.
>for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.<p>Love to see you mix unsubstantiated vitriol with overt lies like this.
Maybe critique his ideas instead of his predictions. Piketty is an economist, not a future-teller.
What's the significance of his "ideas" with respect to economics if they don't lead to actual predictions?<p>Why did he decide to make these predictions if his ideas supposedly have no bearing on how predictions are created?<p>Does economics no longer even have the pretense of being a science, which by its very nature exists to make testable predictions?
If he is confident enough to make economic predictions, it’s only fair that we take him to task on these.
Anyone who flat out dismisses others work because they are "marxist" is only proclaiming their own ignorance on economic topics.
Let's see.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty</a><p>> A visit to the Soviet Union in 1991 was enough to make him a firm "believe[r] in capitalism, private property and the market"<p>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)?<p>> 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.<p>No, looks like he just wants taxes. Case closed: this is instance #54367 of an economic conservative pretending that it's marxism to tax a penny from a billionaire. And you call yourself "pirate"? Sigh.
Taleb joke:<p>junior trader for a bank looses $10 mil. boss asks him what happened. trader says he sold oil because bank economist said oil price will go down. boss fires him. junior asks how could he become a good trader if he's fired on the first losing trade. boss says "no, you idiot, I didn't fire you because you made a losing trade, I fired you because you listened to our economist"
I come from a research background, and transitioned to software later. There is an interesting tendency of software engineers to believe they have skills outside of their skillset.<p>Relevant here: the would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Part of my software engineering skillset is "going native" with subject matter experts to be able to get more out out of them and even work around the lack of sufficient SME on a project.<p>I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.
Sounds like a similar track, and I agree that its a useful skill and talent.<p>What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.
> would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?<p>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.<p>People who are deep in the inner workings of this stuff day in and day out are the only ones who have a chance at having any real insight.
If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, in fact, don't listen to anyone, no one was able to predict what the economy was going to do pre-AI, no one has any clue what's going on.
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence.
That was pushed over the top by hype and overfunding before it was cost effective. Like Uber and Space-X.
Krugman is a bitch.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM</a>
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.<p>If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
[dead]
For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.
Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.
I love how you act like it's an insane premise, then go on to list a bunch of stuff that's literally happening now...
I guess you don't know about North Korea
We do know about North Korea. It doesn't exist in a bubble. It's a product of a particular culture and a particular series of historical events as well as regional and geopolitical relationships, most notably its relationships with South Korea, China, and the US.<p>The claim that the North Korean dystopian dictatorship could be generalized to all cultures, across all cultures, merely on the economic and military capabilities of AI, is an extraordinary one. It relies on a great many assumptions about the political as well as independent, personal, and organized responses to the societal changes that would need to take place in order to bring it about.
What AI really seems to be posed to do is make labour a lot less valuable and capital a lot more valuable.<p>Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
We've moved all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and the well is running dry. There's nothing to be done!
Why does running a government require a lot of cash flow? To pay people? Like, labor..?
> 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.<p>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?
I've held this view and talked about it many times here before.<p>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.<p>Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.
For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?<p>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.<p>AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.
>What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?<p>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.<p>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).<p>The particular problem we have is without something for 'labor' to do in the future the world we have now breaks.
To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.
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.<p>Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.
Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up
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.
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.<p>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)<p>If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.<p>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.<p>I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.
Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).<p>This timeline is straight ass.
What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.<p>Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?
"AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.
Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?
That's like asking of the Internet "communication for whom?"<p>The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.<p>It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded <i>very</i> weird even 50 years ago.<p>Why is it so hard to imagine that humans may not be a necessary component in the economy?
I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.<p>> <i>The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.</i><p>I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?<p>> <i>It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.</i><p>But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.<p>Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...<p>But <i>if</i> a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.
I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.<p>Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.<p>You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.<p>Still you must agree that there is <i>some</i> level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?<p>And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.
Yea, the original statistic was not about bytes, but about connections, in which 57% of all traffic on the web is not from a direct human action.<p>>But these bytes are in service of a human?<p>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.<p>And we're not even at the point of AGI/ASI yet. That's when some other agent with their non-human goals can start doing things.
Bots defrauding bots while training new fraud bots.
Sounds terrible
Fully agree with this<p>My personal agent system is actually chartered around funding/generating its own energy resources in the long term.<p>Its most likely going to have a copy of itself running on a solar powered server somewhere before I know it LOL
Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital?<p>It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.<p>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.
Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.<p>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.<p>I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.
Wealth is not a goal, it shouldn't be. Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power, not necessarily with money. So yes, it will always matter especially to people that like to have power over other people.
Of course it does. It’s still a measurement though against other super rich.
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.<p>The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.<p>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<p>> The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies<p>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
I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.
A data centre the size of Gormenghast, with the remains of humanity clinging like limpets to the outer walls, trying to stay warm.<p></doomer>
The technical term is ‘mirror life’.
Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires
Without humans and our content, AI is irrelevant! For it to stay relevant I think it needs to pay every human for the daily content we all create (daily conversations, photos, videos) and choose to publish to web daily. Cloudflare only lets bots into our websites upon AI bots from all industries pay to enter our sites.<p>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.<p>Wrote about my idea how to get us all paid from the content we create daily last week on my substack <a href="https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans-content" rel="nofollow">https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...</a><p>Though we could all just go back to living off the land...
"Why is it a winner takes all situation?"<p>I have lawyer agent x10 better than yours in a civil matter. Guess who wins. What value is second best lawyer?
That's meaningless. First, there's no evidence that one legal agent would be 10x better than another. Second, winning a case requires more than just a good lawyer. At some point you have to actually have the facts and/or law on your side.<p>Some of you have never spent any time in a courtroom and it shows.
It depends on the evidence available.
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.<p>The one with the wealth would be effectively be unable to obtain greater wealth, power, or influence.<p>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.<p>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!<p>Holding on to all the wealth so that nobody else can get it would be highly detrimental to a capitalistic society.
For some people it's a zero sum game. If you have 99% of it, you won.
> then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it<p>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
> Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.<p>Where do these few acquire all their wealth?<p>What happens when these remaining few need to compete?
In the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land.<p>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)
In any given game, why are there always a few (say 3) top players?<p>Same reason.
I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in 100+ miles with EM noise. And that is assuming their isn't any larger organized resistance organizations.
EMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
How will the people working on exactly what they want to eat?
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.<p>Call it 'basic income' if that helps.
If I’m one of the six people who ends up with all the money and controlling all the robots, why do I want your 3 bed 2 bath house in Tennessee? Trying to take it from you will only make you riot.<p>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.<p>Of course, your average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
You will need electricity, water you will be producing waste etc. in your Tennessee house. Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?<p>Really I don’t see any playable alternative other than near complete annihilation of human race. It’s very similar to a nuclear apocalypse. Very few get to survive.
>Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?<p>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..<p>Thus governments (the people really/ideally) will see to it that everyone will be comfortable with minimum amount of work utilizing the robots.<p>One can dream!
Realistically though, if there are some humans left, they are going to want to live in a society. Humans are fundamentally social and I think the people in charge would eventually realize this. But then again rich people are not normal, so maybe not
>they are going to want to live in a society.<p>Now stop and imagine what kind of society the rich people you know and hear of would want to live in?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There are a number of people that already think that the Earths population should be culled back to a few million people. Giving people that believe this power seems to be a really good way to cause a genocide.
Bruh. This has nothing to do with like Elon coming and taking the house away. This is just plain old reality.<p>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.<p>Also, hang on. Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
> The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes<p>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.<p>> Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.<p>Reading comprehension. These are the two relevant statements - speaking of the average:<p>> we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.<p>and speaking of HN denizens:<p>> average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
I think everyone who is able should earn their keep. From ants to lions, to survive and live, even if in meager spurts they must put in some work.
In all likelihood you will end up more like a Syrian refugee than mr outdoor survivor manly man.
Only if wealth will be evenly distributed, otherwise you're just enriching someone else.
Would you accept "fairly" distributed instead of "evenly"?<p>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?<p>I don't think the problem is that some work earns different amounts of money. To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands, because the people doing the work are not being compensated fairly
"fair" involves a value judgement and requires a moral system.
"even" is pure mathematics.<p>> I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly?<p>Agreeing with that is easy. Agreeing with which jobs should be compensated more highly is hard. Because everyone has different morality systems.<p>> To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands<p>I know people who strongly believe Bezos and other billionaires are being <fairly> compensated for the value they've brought to their customers via their businesses.
I would prefer "evenly" but "fairly" would be better than what we have now. If AI and robots are going to make infinite progress and replace all labor, then I definitely would want "evenly".
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.<p>I realize we’re probably not going to see it in our lifetimes but that will be the norm in the future.<p>Also that extremely ingrained mindset of earning your keep is exactly what keeps most of the world working hard while the elite jetset and live a life of pleasure.
More than a mindset, it also takes quite a bit of money to live in a permanent vacation 24/7, even modestly.<p>Aside from the income, employment also has a way of occupying one’s time. Without that, one would often spend additional funds on various forms of entertainment (books, movies, crafts, travel, etc.)…
I disagree. I think certain art and creative pursuits will always garner a premium when it’s human made, no matter how good something computer generated is. Just look at the game of chess. No one watches two computers playing each other even though they’re better than any human in the world. People watch other people play. There are lots of avenues like that where people will only watch other people do things, or only purchase things made by other people, even if they are lower quality.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Honestly, yes, it does sound like fantastical utopian thinking, but I don’t think you have to make that many leaps to get there.
Without direction or a pull in life people tend to self-destruct. Even the wealthy are susceptible to this. Hollywood nepotites are a nice example: they live off their parents's wealth or easily acquired money and self-destroy themselves. They are not engaging in higher pursuits but rather basic degeneration. Not all of course; some do good, productive things.
It's easy to point to high profile nepotites but I've known plenty of folks from all classes who have self-destructed. It's hardly limited to those with lives of leisure.
Many people will I think but not most. Also, since we’re talking about fantastical things, you could have lots of things to mitigate this. If someone has a pattern of self-destructive behavior, you could essentially have two robots follow them around everywhere as a more effective ankle bracelet. And they’re specifically tasked with keeping you from trouble and stopping you from ruining your life. Maybe that can replace prisons.
Not really - books and movies at the library are free and those who cultivate interests will find no trouble filling up the day.
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).<p>I don't really understand the comments (apparently) denying the basic logic of this scenario (maybe the article is so confusing that they, or I, am wrong about what it's trying to say). IMO the only real question is how close current technology is to achieving this scenario.
This 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<p>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
Inb4 the economy is just a paperclip maximizer, a hedonium maximizer, and 5 different AGIs built to maximally enrich their creators all trading with each other.
You just described the plot of Alien: Earth!
Paraphrasing Nate Hagens, at the end of the day the modern economy just turns megalitres of oil into microlitres of dopamine
lol or my favorite theory: I wake up and it is 1994. I am 3 years old, outside with my grandpa <3<p>well, shit. here we go again.<p>like, what even is consciousness and all that :s sorry, just thought i'd share lol
The idea that the economy is based on "consumption" depends on how you define "consumption".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>So even if AI is going to replace a whole lot of jobs, you would still have some people paying others to serve them just because people like having other people serve them.
but would the scale stay the same?<p>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.
[dead]
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune%3A_The_Butlerian_Jihad" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune%3A_The_Butlerian_Jihad</a>
This article is exactly as annoying as politicians who ascribe everything to the Economy.
This seems the kind of (scarily true) thing I’d expect Charles Stross to write about.
Yes, definitely. Shades of Accelerando, Saturn's Children, and Neptune's Brood. Give me the tentacles any day.
See <a href="https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/page/n7/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/page/n7/m...</a>
See also <a href="https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory" rel="nofollow">https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory</a> which was thoroughly discussed 17 days ago at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712</a> (1426 comments).
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.<p>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.<p>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%.<p>I hope to god that when an ASI is built, and in the unlikely case that it doesn't simply overthrow humanity, that we will have a political structure in place that gives everyone a meaningful share in the fruits of ASI. Or that the owners of this ASI consider every other human to be utterly useless, f off to their Randian paradise, and leave the rest of us completely alone. The middle ground between these two is where dystopia lives
I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% <i>less</i> interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply. "Humans will be so rich they will fuck off to other parts of the world and leave gorilla habitat alone" hasn't really panned out so well.
Unless this ASI either way, turns the world into an opencast mine and burns off the atmosphere on the way out..
>They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.<p>See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.<p>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.
Pointless economy? Technically Possible!
This whole post rests on a basic misunderstanding of economics.
"Once the owning class owns mostly everything <i>and</i> has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them."<p>----------------<p>This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even <i>worse</i> for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.<p>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?
Suppose we modeled this as two separate countries:<p>* AI Island: just runs AI in data centers.<p>* Elsewhere: same as now.<p>Wouldn't there be gains from trade?<p>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?<p>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.
> 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<p>When?<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>A lot of this article is just vibes, not data.
Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1].<p>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).<p>[1]: <a href="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology" rel="nofollow">https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology</a>
Im getting really tired of these cloudflare anti-ddos screens. They take forever, often literally. There's another one of these that shows an anime girl, whatever that one is, it's way better.
Literally does not work for me at all, just keeps reloading and spinning. I'm not even on my VPN. Really frustrating dealing with these things lately.
I like Anubis, I immediately exit if I see Cloudfare. The UX of the latter is so much worse even when it works, takes 5x longer and has a pattern of wait --> require interaction --> wait whereas Anubis requires no interaction, is almost instant, and is a bit of cute whimsy that makes me smile.
Same here.
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.
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
Paperclip maximizer
There's a lot of bad economics and assumptions here even if the conclusion is plausible.<p>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.
"If agi and perfect humanoid robot slaves, then xyz". That's a motherfucking big "if".
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.<p>Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The aggregate demand equation is as follows:<p>AD = C + I + G + NX<p>C = Consumer Spending
I = Investment
G = Government Spending
NX = Net Exports<p>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 <i>must</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Look at this discussion. All this so a bunch of nerds can be allowed to play with their newest toy.
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?<p>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.<p>The dream of elon musk et al is to keep accumulating power and have non-humans serve them. They don’t want us, and as soon as they can they will replace us. But here we are giving them more power. Ridiculous
> But here we are giving them more power.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So the real practical question ends up being how good the ultra rich can make their AI defense bots before that happens.
I don't think ultra weathy are a bad thing if their results move society foward. As of right now it's very obvious they are mostly aligned mostly because how technology functions.<p>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.<p>I see no other economic system driving as effeciently as heavily rewarding greed. You can't create the future by commitee.<p>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.<p>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.<p>EU is another alternative and they are slowly moving to the edge of collapse. Mass tax/regulation AND no wealth generation.<p>Choose your poison but there's really no other magical alternative here.
Damn downvoted to oblivion 3 minutes after you posted this. The bots are out in force on this one.
<i>Once the owning class owns mostly everything </i>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.*<p>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.<p>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?
> <i>they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists</i><p>They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.
If nobody is being paid, who is buying, and what defines the price and elasticity?<p>I mean this has a lot of "Pooh! that's not honey, thats SOCIALISM" in it
I've seen this idea float around r/singularity and r/collapse for years and it's probably responsible for a horrifying amount of suicides at this point.<p>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.<p>I would really like if people stopped spreading this anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy. It's something I have to give Luke Drago some points for, he actually cares about the problem rather than just saying the inevitable eternal stratification hypersuffering anti-singularity is inevitable and implying that death is preferable.
All workable policy paths involve taxing capital and you're gonna call that Marxist even though it isn't, so we're at an impasse.
>reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history<p>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.<p>>anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy<p>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.<p>You want to address the paranoia people feel? You have to also address that lack of trust in our government. That's a tall order.
It isn't inevitable but it is where we are heading. We are basically in the early 1930s. Even fighting against it and winning is going to be extremely ugly. And that is the most optimistic scenario.
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
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.<p><a href="https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchange-not-zero-sum-game" rel="nofollow">https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchange-not-zero-sum-game</a>