"The economy" is just the word we use for transacting between one another. Whether individuals, or businesses, or a combination.
The economy as it exists in popular culture is just a tool to bludgeon people over the head into acceptance of their pre-determined role/rank in society (and softly "nudge" their decision making in the direction of submission to larger, more wealthy entities/individuals).
It's a Girard-style scapegoat designed to be a target for all of the predictable vitriol and confusion of an unpredictable and unknowable future.
The thing that helped me think less in terms of "oh no the economy is bad, panic" and more so in "okay, what are you going to do about it" was this [1].
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.
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.
> In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak
In the past, this was a reason to have children, because you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old. Now, it's a reason not to have children, because you're putting people into a world knowing that there is a non-trivial probability that they will suffer all their lives through wars, famine, social unrest, and other man-made disasters.
If you think that you're simply incorrect. For the average person in a Western country, life is dramatically better anytime in the next hundred years, including the worst possible outcomes of climate change. Not to mention that the exponential growth of solar panels is basically stabilized in climate right now.
> you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old
Even with social programs in society, this still hasn't gone away. This is still kind of a reason to have kids, and for your siblings to have kids, and have family networks grow to help support each other.
> you're putting people into a world knowing that there is a non-trivial probability that they will suffer all their lives through wars, famine, social unrest, and other man-made disasters
Once again, all of this has also been true for all of human history. Other than a brief moment for the northwestern part of the world for wealtheir people in the 90s-maybe 00s, this has just been the normal state of affairs. Life has always had suffering involved.
> In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak.
No, the rate of change was slow enough that you could probably make a good-enough prediction: your life would be similar to that of your father's or grandfathers'.
The problem is that nowadays, some foolish technology-worshiping assholes have pushed the rate of change faster than almost anyone can handle: before we've started to learn to deal with the problems of one technology, another technology disrupts everything again. Society needs to operate at a human scale, and a human speed, or it will kill itself.
And it's worth noting (because I'm sure some "clever" software engineer is going to quote Socrates thinking its some kind of mic drop or something), that I'm not saying change all the sudden got too fast just recently. It's probably been like that for awhile (e.g. since the 70s or before).
> Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children
I think this premise is questionable. I double that choice had much to do with it, for most of our ancestors. In particular a large fraction of children (majority?) born were not born out the free choice of the parents, but rather as a result of accident, social pressure/expectation, economic necessity etc.
Given a free choice, the same uncertain and/or bleak future produces the rational outcome that it does not seem prudent to have children.
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.
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.
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...
Modern society has much better transportation. The odds of correlated bad harvests around the world are much worse than local bad harvest in the past. I guarantee every place on earth will have a bad harvest, sometimes two in the next 20 years, but since there is enough harvest overall we are fine.
> 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]
I didn't say it would kill everyone though. I said it would kill you. Your neighbors may get just enough to survive, but not enough to keep you alive. (If they have surplus they would help you survive - with the expectation you would return that favor in 10-20 years when the situation reverses.
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.
There is every reason to think legal consequences + misfortune of a child are more devastating than just misfortune of a child. For one, for instance people have had all their children removed when a single child has a fragile bone disease or similar poorly explained illness causing injury or death and CPS accuses the parents of abuse and causes the trauma of not just losing/injury of the child but also losing all your children and possibly being charged. There are cases of people adopting abused children and documenting the prior abuse at time of adoption, but then having their other kids removed when doctors find the signs of the prior documented abuse when the child dies despite the best efforts of the person adopting the child.
I don't know why on earth you would think the trauma of having the legal system + other people attacking you + possibly losing custody of your other kids wouldn't cause more devastation. The whole system is geared around causing additional devastation for families this happens to compared to in prior times.
Maybe the chance of having a child die or an unfixable injured is less than before, but the weight of consequences to consider are higher than before.
What a weird take. You make it sound like their dead children were no big deal, but by god, someone not paying for your children for you is a catastrophe.
> And if you died of starvation, welp your responsibilities in life have ended.
Yes, gosh, imagine people making a big deal out of starving to death. At least they didn't owe someone money.
>ou make it sound like their dead children were no big deal, but by god, someone not paying for your children for you is a catastrophe.
No I'm pointing out American society's fake concern for the welfare of children. They don't punish parents to help children. In fact, it's almost totally crickets when it comes to helping the children. We even spend a gazillion dollars on guided missiles to bomb girls' schools in Iran with barely a fuck given about the children inside. The point is to assert smug moral superiority and to punish, jail, and harass parents not help the children. Society wants all the upside of asserting their opinion on parenting and stomping the boot down on parents but none of the responsibility that goes with the choice to assert your opinion on how children should be raised. Wanting kids raised a certain way while shunting all the responsibility on others at ~no cost to yourself except to punish those who fail to live up to your standards, it's the cheapest and most disingenuous kind of concern but frighteningly actually backed by the precious projection of the "rule of law" that arguably makes children even worse off while also acting as a signal towards inhibiting people to have children since they don't want to subject their every lifestyle choice to the whims of "think of the children" psychopaths that can start a CPS investigation ("we investigate every tip") at the drop of a hat.
> imagine people making a big deal out of starving to death. At least they didn't owe someone money.
I don't think I need to explain why people who have starved to death are able to make less of a "big deal" out of their lot than living people who owe money.
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
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
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.
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.
It's the ultra rich's domestication program. It is after all how they got control away from the previous civilization scale domesticators/farmers, the monarchies.
The fun part is we can believe AI will generate boatloads of cash and require no additional cash, and financial history will come to an end. But the future is not set in stone. Simplistic, naive and even optimistic and maximalist thoughts about AI are in the end just guesses.
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.
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.
you have enough money to buy a phone and spare time to comment, just like me, while people die of hunger and thirst in Sudan: 50 dollars would buy life saving medicines and water treatment. but i spent it on a Spotify subscription and some weed.
also, i stepped over a homeless guy on my way into the grocery store last week.
>also, i stepped over a homeless guy on my way into the grocery store last week.
This.
The evidence that it's possible is all around us. Right in our faces. That people believe that, somehow, other people will start caring when it's me who doesn't have water is a bit naive. Why would people not just step over a hypothetical "homeless me" on their way to get a Starbuck's?
It's even easier to ignore if the vast majority of such people are not on the streets, but safely hidden away in crappy parts of town struggling to afford their rent and food. That way the privileged don't have to see them.
Not saying it's good or right, just kind of saying, I mean, of course it's possible. It's the way things work right now.
If the poster didn't notice it works like this, chances are, they were always one of the people in the caravan who had the water.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.
And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.
This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.
But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.
> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.
The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions
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.
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.
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.
Health care is a major factor for any modern society. A society may allow a few members to opt-out, but only because someone else is taking their share of the cost. Sure health care is expensive in the US, but it isn't much cheaper elsewhere (it is cheaper, but not by that much)
That's not true actually. US healthcare is both expensive at the point of taxpayer spending per capita and at the private expenditure level. It's really lose/lose.
In most of the world, healthcare isn't tied to your employment. In the United States, healthcare access for working-age people is practically inaccessible* without a full-time job.
* Yes, Medicaid exists, but finding providers that accept it can be difficult, and dealing with the bureaucracy to obtain/keep coverage is daunting.
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.
> 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):
Let’s try: George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours. People usually want more. But at many times and within many social movements— religious, political, artistic— people have chosen to want less. Maybe that is part of the answer.
>George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours
And George Collins is wrong. My rent (for two people) is 1000€ (60m²), electricity is 150, food is 600, internet 50, total of about 2000. Say 1000 since we split that in half, and maybe i'll even reduce those needs, live in a smaller space, heat myself less in winter so it goes down to 800.
That's about 35 hours of work for the absolute bare minimum, 70 including my wife. That means no car, using my bike for everything, eating objectively worse food for my health (not talking about caviar there), get rid of pets, etc, etc.
one full week of worth each to cover the bare minimum. and let's be honest, I'm quite well off there. People on median income would _die_. They already do, working the full month.
George Collins would do well to read more sociology and not generalize.
For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly.
It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.
Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.
This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
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.
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.
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.
I had a coworker who spent his career working for 2 years then taking 2 years off to live off the savings. Have you considered such a strategy? It seemed to be working out well enough for him.
> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat
Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive
It's always the choice between flying cars and living in a hut made of cow dung, right? No in between is conceivable by the human brain, either boundless growth or the Neolithic
I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.
A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.
Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.
I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.
Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.
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.
> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)
I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost
Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.
You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.
> 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.
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
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.
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?
The argument that commoners now live better than historical kings because we possess better technology is reductive if by living better you mean life satisfaction. Happiness is relative. Most people compare themselves to their peers. This is borne out by a multitude of studies one being that upper middle class people are unhappier living in upper class neighborhoods than in middle class neighborhoods despite the richer neighborhood having lower crime, better services, etc.
There will never be a point that society at large will decline to exploit resources when there is competition for those resources. It's easy to see why on average this behavior is common from an evolutionary perspective.
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.
> 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)
Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.
UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
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.
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
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.
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%
> You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want.
The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working
Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.
Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
That's assuming all of your current pay is going to necessities - salaries here pay well in excess provided your 'wants' are few, you can cover the things that matter (housing, food, etc) and get your time back.
Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.
That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think
> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around.
Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.
It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.
People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.
Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.
Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining.
Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.
There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter.
If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more.
Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.
Sure it's a social construct, but billions have killed or been killed for money, land, and ownership of assets. Social constructions at their extreme are just abstractions of power which determines life and death. Something being a social construct does not make it invalid or ignorable. All of life is a series of intrapersonal relationships built atop social constructions. I'm sorry but I find pointing out something being a social construct only serves a somewhat naive/juvenile purpose as an easy way to make a statement look nonsensical.
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.
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.
I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans.
Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.
I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".
Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.
I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.
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."
The important question is, who has power in such an economy?
In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.
Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.
I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.
Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights.
If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
Right. And if one actor happens to accrue greater power you would have less disincentive to crush your competitors. (Honestly this could happen even before people-less economies, but the disconnect from democratic opinion is even stronger with humans out of the loop.)
Basically if you don’t need voters, and / or none of your voters are dying in your wars, the biggest practical rate limiter on modern conflict is removed.
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.
> 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.
> 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"
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)
>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment.
You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on.
You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters.
You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either.
You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips.
You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house.
Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm.
You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work.
A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is.
>Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value.
Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes.
That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy"
Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Also remember that the Koch Bros (plus numerous other billionaires) have spent billions [0] poisoning economics academia by funding their narcissistic version of pseudo-libertarianism across think tanks, lobbyists, and colleges... They're so "Libertarian" they believe corporate dictatorship is freedom and poisoning their communities is the communities problem.
I remember first going to a party at an Economics students house 20 years ago, and thinking they all seemed like they were in a cult. Wasn't until fairly recently I figured out it was from propaganda.
junior trader for a bank looses $10 mil. boss asks him what happened. trader says he sold oil because bank economist said oil price will go down. boss fires him. junior asks how could he become a good trader if he's fired on the first losing trade. boss says "no, you idiot, I didn't fire you because you made a losing trade, I fired you because you listened to our economist"
I come from a research background, and transitioned to software later. There is an interesting tendency of software engineers to believe they have skills outside of their skillset.
Relevant here: the would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Part of my software engineering skillset is "going native" with subject matter experts to be able to get more out out of them and even work around the lack of sufficient SME on a project.
I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.
Sounds like a similar track, and I agree that its a useful skill and talent.
What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.
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).
> would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Valid point, but it suggests a mathematician who understands the math behind AI is more capable of grasping its trajectory, which is probably not the case.
People who are deep in the inner workings of this stuff day in and day out are the only ones who have a chance at having any real insight.
I think more broadly that grabbing attention with predictions and hot takes has become lucrative, and we definitely don’t celebrate prediction accuracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence.
That was pushed over the top by hype and overfunding before it was cost effective. Like Uber and Space-X.
I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life.
If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
Are there specific things that Krugman has been wrong about that you have in mind, because he has made a number of notable good calls: he predicted that the 2009 stimulus would be too small:
A bunch of folks predicted that QE would cause all sorts of bad things:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
He took the other side of that and was right. When QE2 came around, Pimco—the famous bond trading folks—predicted certain things would happen and put large amounts of money on those predictions, and again he said it was all wrong, and Pimco turned out wrong:
This isn't to say he's always right. He has been wrong, but more importantly he admits when he's wrong and tries to figure out why:
> The first thing I want to say, I think most of our audience here, at least the economists, remember the big debates over QE early in the last decade, and all of the economists who predicted dangerous inflation and then refuse to admit that they've been wrong. And I don't want to be one of those guys, so I need to start out by saying that when we had our last discussion I was relaxed about the inflationary outlook and I was wrong, it turns out that inflation is coming way higher than I expected and I think the important thing on stuff like that is to try and figure out why you were wrong and learn from it. It's when you get to the why I was wrong, what's odd is it's not the simple script that I might have expected. For those who remember our earlier debate, that was centered mostly on fiscal policy, which I think is not going to be the case now and it was centered around the American rescue plan, which was a very big slug of money. And Larry was arguing, like a lot of people, that it was just way too big, that it was too much stimulus and that the economy would massively overheat. I was, I agreed that it was a lot of money, but argued that it wasn't designed as stimulus and, in fact, you know that had other purposes, and that it was likely to have low multipliers, so that there wouldn't be that much overheating. […]
More generally, if you look at the people Krugman has been arguing against, they've been more wrong, more often, more longer than he probably has, pushing garbage for decades:
Is there someone(s) else that should be listened to more? (Certainly not Austrians or (Friedman) Monetarists, or anyone putting forward trickle down non-sense (that's basically most folks on the political right).)
For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.
Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.
One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives.
Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value.
That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top.
If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis.
Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.
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.
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.
It’s an economic fallacy that a group of people would get “locked out” of the economy.
If you and I are able to work, but can’t get jobs because robots do all the jobs, then we’re not just going to sit on our hands and starve. You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.
The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.
Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.
Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.
> The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?
> If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.
No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:
> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.
The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?
I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.
Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.
> The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population.
At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done.
At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison.
The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you.
Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs
Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs
Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison
Population: how did you say we can get them?
A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots.
Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.
>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
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.
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.
>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?
As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that.
>Taxes from what..
Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.
The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5].
All these programs poll above majorities in the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too.
If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people."
It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions.
Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)?
People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.
You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.
If you don't understand how elites have used the US military to strong arm their holdings throughout the world, IDK what to tell you. US imperialism is a real thing that has existed for the last 120+ years, it has also only benefited a small minority of rich Americans.
See the banana wars, see the US oil interests in the middle east. These are just two major examples.
Acting like the US won't do this again when the elites have captured the political apparatus is the foolish part, especially when this is the current operating procedure at the moment (protecting money over basic human rights).
> The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
Yes, but how it changes depends entirely on who owns the robots.
There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, and huge evidence that self-centered wealthy billionaires (and trillionaires!) will own them.
In such a case, the response to "the robots will make everything" isn't "so give it away to the people for free! :-)". It's "so what do I need all these stupid people for? make killbots to keep them away from my fully-automated luxury oligarchy compound!"
>There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots,
But that is up to the people and their governments to decide. You seem to miss the fact that governments are made by people and for the people, and not made by the billionaires. Even a billionaire have a single vote.
Government can outlaw the private ownership of combat autonomous robots if that is what the people want.
> But that is up to the people and their governments to decide.
This is laughably naïve in 2026. There's been massive amounts of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other forms of legal vote-rigging in the US, not to mention the tremendous amount of propaganda that's been fed to the country for decades in support of the oligarchs' agenda.
And then we get into the even darker possibilities, such as Trump's repeated suggestions that we don't need to vote again, that he could have a third term, his thanks to Musk for delivering him the election, etc.
And frankly, if you think that the disposition of the hypothetical robots is up to the people to decide, then surely you must believe that the current state of Western governments in 2026 genuinely represents the will of the people. If you extend that line of thought out logically, then just as surely you must conclude that there is, at least, a very high probability that the people would decide to give the robots to the oligarchs, even knowing that those robots would kill said people.
For all the other economic activities that robots don't run? 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.
As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
> 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked.
X for doubt. When automation entered agriculture, we started producing way more for way less. Agriculture stopped becoming a significant part for most developed economies in terms of both GDP contribution and employment.
> All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.
X. The people who lose jobs rarely find something anew - they'll simply become part of an expanding labour pool, further depressing wages. All while some numpty politician would be telling them they need to stop farming and start learning how to code (never mind there's absolutely no point in doing that either).
> As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.
> 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.
>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.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Figuring out what to produce and how to allocate resources are algorithmically hard problems, even if you know people’s valuation functions. Without some kind of market mechanism to partially reveal valuations it is very difficult indeed. AI is not magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle on your problems to make them go away.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Or, what the billionaires are actually thinking, remove entire swathes of the population from the equation.
Now the reasonable ones might think "hey, even if that sounds 'rational', isn't that very risky? What happens if the machines don't actually cut it? Then we'd be stuck with not enough people to support our lavish lifestyles? And we can't exactly spin up millions of people in an instant, so where does that leave us?"
Well, they wouldn't be billionaires if they were reasonable so here we are.
As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a billionaire"
You should check out "Four Futures" by Peter Frase. This would be the "extermination" future and like you I think it's the most likely one without extreme counteraction.
> 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.
>AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
AI could also be able to figure out how much to produce and how to limit waste in a way that leaves you to starve. And there won't be anything you can do about it. And this solution would, it turns out, suit the people who still have influence in how the system works just fine.
>ou and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.
But what would you even trade? Do you have anything that a starving unemployed man who bargain for? And does he have anything you want?
It’s amazing seeing so many people reconstruct socialism and technocratic communism of the 60s from base principles and completely be ignorant of everything we learned about it.
What AI really seems to be posed to do is make labour a lot less valuable and capital a lot more valuable.
Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
> Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
Why presume that "running a government" is inevitable at all? How much longer do we think these states of old are going to putter on for?
Governments are inevitable. Even when you look at so-called "lawless places" or "failed states", you'll find governments: de-facto governments run by warlords and criminals.
Nature abhors a vacuum and that principle extends to power vacuums.
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
Nobody wants to live in a mining economy. Human slavery, extraordinary taxes, no public infrastructure. Conceivably you only need two roads total: one from the palace to the airport and another from the mine to the docks. Any more and someone might try to build a school.
It seems to me that human quality of life is really tightly coupled to economic systems where there is a high ROI in investing in the public.
This is what spooks me about AI. A slow but observable descent on the continuum from knowledge economy to diamond mine economy. The rust belt metastasizes and oversupply of human laborers is such a problem things get really hunger games about which libraries and universities get their bills paid.
This suggests to me more separation into industrial versus residential areas. (Or what is the mining for?)
Historically, mechanized agriculture allowed most people to move to cities, then to suburbs. Industry became globalized and off-shored.
These changes in land use have gone on for a long time. Now we’re getting more solar farms and data centers. Due to Internet shopping, malls close and get converted into residential. There are more warehouses, but shoppers don’t go there.
You could think of it as people being increasingly alienated from where the work is done. The logical conclusion is something like a retirement community where goods and services are delivered where possible and the people who work locally are directly providing services to other people there.
And retirees are people who secured an income through whatever means and don’t have to work anymore. They don’t have to worry about how AI will affect their job.
This is why I get worried about the hatred for income taxes. No, you want the government to want you to be richer. If all they raised was property taxes, then they don't care if you get priced out of your home, as long as someone's buying.
the economy sucks. the fact that cars cost 30k. the fact that morrocco has high speed rail and california doesn’t. the fact that practically no new housing gets built in san francisco.
the economy needs to get a whole lot better before i would even consider something like this looking true. human demands are wildly elastic, which is why we’re not all farmers riding around in horse drawn carriages still.
I've held this view and talked about it many times here before.
It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat.
Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.
For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?
That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and their rulers fight and trade. Or all of earth is government by one oppressive dictator. So far it seems the broader incentives/forces push us in a different direction.
AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.
To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.
Why does it feel silly? There are already billionaires, and now Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and they still want more even though they have enough money to spend for several lifetimes.
Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.
Many people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc)
If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.
What's more likely to happen is that the economy might split. Organizations that have no need for human labor or input are essentially islands unto themselves. The only remaining economic link is the substrate -- the land we all inhabit -- is shared.
I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.
Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).
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?
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?
> 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).
I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.
> The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.
I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?
> It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.
But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.
Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...
But if a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.
I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.
Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.
You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.
Still you must agree that there is some level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?
And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.
Yea, the original statistic was not about bytes, but about connections, in which 57% of all traffic on the web is not from a direct human action.
>But these bytes are in service of a human?
I mean, lets say that 99.9% of all traffic on the net was by one person running an AI to get them rich, we'd call that traffic 'in service of a human' by your set of rules but it does kind of break historically how pretty much all communication in history worked until we started controlling stuff with wires and radios. That is, one person with one prompt can cause a hell of a lot of communication now.
And we're not even at the point of AGI/ASI yet. That's when some other agent with their non-human goals can start doing things.
What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.
Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?
"AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.
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.
Ok if I’m bored I’ll be talking about fun things to do with colleagues. If only for bragging rights, impressing friends, or hacker news upvotes. My time is limited so, I’d need to be careful about how I allocate that resource to projects.
That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital?
It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.
This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just mass produce robots to protect you.
Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized.
The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.
I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.
Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
The underlying assumption here is that there is always something established players won't try to buy out new companies or use their existing capital to screw over others
> The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies
Right now that is not the case. Look at the PC industry. I worry for the autonomy of a consumer in the future. It's probably going to be something like here is your rental thin client PC with agents on a monthly rental plan. What's that? you want to build a game with your own gpu? No no. A consumer grade gpu does not make sense in this day and age. Just ask the agent to build your game. We need the gpu compute for better things
Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires
Without humans and our content, AI is irrelevant! For it to stay relevant I think it needs to pay every human for the daily content we all create (daily conversations, photos, videos) and choose to publish to web daily. Cloudflare only lets bots into our websites upon AI bots from all industries pay to enter our sites.
Overall if we want to keep this society economy we are use to with AI in the picture ... we need to thrive off of AI .. not just AI thriving off our backs and destroying the society we know.
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.
That's meaningless. First, there's no evidence that one legal agent would be 10x better than another. Second, winning a case requires more than just a good lawyer. At some point you have to actually have the facts and/or law on your side.
Some of you have never spent any time in a courtroom and it shows.
Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.
Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets.
I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.
Wealth is not a goal, it shouldn't be. Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power, not necessarily with money. So yes, it will always matter especially to people that like to have power over other people.
Ironically, if 1 person had 99.99% of all the wealth in the world, I’m not entirely sure it would have as much meaning as one might assume.
The one with the wealth would be effectively be unable to obtain greater wealth, power, or influence.
Other this individual being able to command arbitrary amounts of goods and services, the rest would compete for the remaining scraps as we do today.
Ironically, if they want technological innovation and all the fancy toys that result, then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it!
Holding on to all the wealth so that nobody else can get it would be highly detrimental to a capitalistic society.
> then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it
They can give them drones to aim at - enjoy your serfdom, let the AI tell you how to live your best life, don’t worry and don’t step out of the walled garden
In the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land.
Now if we are lucky and the owners are humans with a good heart (and not AI), maybe there is some room for some people (aka provide authentic experiences)
Money is a mirage. You can't use dollars to hold land; you need force projection.
Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them.
You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase with no injection of money at all.
The first comment said "They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?"
I was explaining that money is irrelevant and so are the jobless masses. Someone owns the factories, and that person is the one who is relevant here. They of course need to be convinced, by money or other means, but the jobless masses are only relevant to the extent that they own and control wealth; since they are jobless, they probably have very little ownership or control.
You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
> You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
Whoa there internet friend! I don't think I said anything about wealth concentration not being a trend. I'm just talking about AI. I'm still waiting for someone to explain coherent, undeniable watertight reasons that we're on a one-way track that goes from AI companies to infinite money glitch or robot death factories. I've already made my arguments against why I don't think it will happen before[0][1]
Maybe the argument is some already-rich fella with magic robot factories will have everything they will ever need, so they brush away all of humanity like an unsightly bit of dandruff on their shoulder with their kill bot drone army.
I guess if you squint at it long enough, that kinda sounds plausible. In the same way someone could press a giant red nuke button and have us all wiped out like a Terminator movie. But it's making a lot of fantastic assumptions without a lot of concreteness. That is, many people seem to be claiming "this is the AI endgame" rather than seeing other possibilities that aren't so ridiculously cynical or nihilistic with leaky abstractions
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the argument isn't that whoever controls AI will use it to kill everyone, it's that they'll control nearly everything because power snowballs.
They could kill everyone, so aren't you glad they decided to open a soup kitchen instead? Here, have some UBI. Of course, it's not quite "universal" yet, so you'll have to sell your house to make it under the means test. A local firm, owned by a national private equity company, forming part of an international portfolio fund, making up an ETF owned mostly by Anthropic investors, will be happy to buy that bit of real estate. Oh, you wrote that on social media? I'm afraid you're not the kind of tenant we're looking for.
This is basically how life already works for people who aren't capable of holding down a job today. I don't think it's ridiculously cynical or nihilistic to extrapolate from the available data and assume it's going to suck once working people have no bargaining power other than asking politely.
Money isnt real. If you can go to a peice of land and just claim it, and no one can rest it from you, then its your land.
Governments and society is what we make to avoid that sort of anarchy, but if certain entities become more powerful than the these institutions, then they can just take over whatever they want
The abstraction of capital and money get a bit funny when wealth is sufficiently concentrated. If there is a monopsomy (one buyer), then they can largely dictate the price of anything. If they also control violent coercion via a captured state or other means, then they can compel production at that price point.
The idea of capitalism only really makes sense when wealth is reasonably distributed such that there is still reasonable competition in both the marketplace and control of the state.
You mean like the Russian oligarchs that keep 'investing' in the war they are in... oh, you mean where they fall out a window when they don't.
The next thing is the idea of money really does break down once you get automation without people. If you have said automation and enough materials to get going you can start increasing your 'wealth' in things like factories/robots/data where the now unemployed stop having any means to make more money. Hence you'll start buying up properties from people that are going bankrupt.
Whatever, let it happen. Humans working on anything other than exactly what they want to do is stupid. The few will eventually have to give the masses the necessities at some point though that can happen in one of two ways, from the very beginning or wrested forcefully after a painful era. Both are better than the current paradigm of what is essentially slavery with extra steps. A world where a human can work exactly on whatever they’re passionate about or not work at all if they don’t want to is the ideal.
Without jobs, and after our savings run out, we will be homeless people. Then, after that, we can try to bargain for ... whatever homeless people get in this society. It doesn't look like much to me.
If I’m one of the six people who ends up with all the money and controlling all the robots, why do I want your 3 bed 2 bath house in Tennessee? Trying to take it from you will only make you riot.
It’s not exactly a bright outlook, but I do think we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
Of course, your average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
You will need electricity, water you will be producing waste etc. in your Tennessee house. Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?
Really I don’t see any playable alternative other than near complete annihilation of human race. It’s very similar to a nuclear apocalypse. Very few get to survive.
>Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?
Ideally governments will see to it. This also assumes that governments have a much larger army of robots than any private individual. Just like how governments makes it illegal to own firearms, it will be illegal to own certain class of robots with combat capability..
Thus governments (the people really/ideally) will see to it that everyone will be comfortable with minimum amount of work utilizing the robots.
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
Realistically though, if there are some humans left, they are going to want to live in a society. Humans are fundamentally social and I think the people in charge would eventually realize this. But then again rich people are not normal, so maybe not
Now stop and imagine what kind of society the rich people you know and hear of would want to live in?
Do they want a bunch of poors around? Of course not. Do they want to give the money so they are not poor? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said poor people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of dumb people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them education so they are not dumb? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said dumb people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of ugly people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them plastic surgery, genetic manipulation so they are not ugly? Of course not. Would many of them 'erase' said ugly people. History says yes.
There are a number of people that already think that the Earths population should be culled back to a few million people. Giving people that believe this power seems to be a really good way to cause a genocide.
Bruh. This has nothing to do with like Elon coming and taking the house away. This is just plain old reality.
Without income or savings, people can't afford houses. How would they pay the property taxes? Can't maintain the house. The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes. This happens all the time. Nobody swoops in and saves those people.
Also, hang on. Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Sold to whom? Isn’t the argument that no one will have money? There are approximately as many houses in the US as there are households. We are not going to see all the houses empty and all the households homeless. Maybe the people who are currently buying at a time when home values are historically high will be shafted. But those houses will not end up empty.
> Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Reading comprehension. These are the two relevant statements - speaking of the average:
> we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
and speaking of HN denizens:
> average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
Would you accept "fairly" distributed instead of "evenly"?
I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly? Jobs that require special skills and training, or require taking on more responsibility?
I don't think the problem is that some work earns different amounts of money. To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands, because the people doing the work are not being compensated fairly
"fair" involves a value judgement and requires a moral system.
"even" is pure mathematics.
> I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly?
Agreeing with that is easy. Agreeing with which jobs should be compensated more highly is hard. Because everyone has different morality systems.
> To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands
I know people who strongly believe Bezos and other billionaires are being <fairly> compensated for the value they've brought to their customers via their businesses.
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).
I would prefer "evenly" but "fairly" would be better than what we have now. If AI and robots are going to make infinite progress and replace all labor, then I definitely would want "evenly".
What would keep people from circumventing a roboticized society and forming their own human-based society? Buy good and services produced by other people and avoid and or penalize members who cheat -ostracize them. There can be parallel systems. Pretty much only communist systems prevent non-communist systems from operating. In capitalist systems communist systems that form from time to time fail because members grow disillusioned with the inevitable slackers and because they operate within a greater society can't just send slackers to gulags or re-educational camps.
In an hypothetical future where society has completely broken down because of extreme concentration of wealth (and means of production and everything) I can see there not being any possibility for a human-based society. In such a doomsday scenario, regular people wouldn't be able to trade anything because they wouldn't be able to produce anything, because all the land will be taken over by the very few ultrarich. Nowhere to live, nowhere to grow food, etc. Essentially surplus population. No government to protect you either, since it will have been coopted by the ultrarich (essentially, them becoming the government). Enforcement could be done by robots, and robots do not revolt or go on strike, nor will they question orders. Maintenance can be done by other robots, harvesting, even health care for the ultrarich.
So how (in this admittedly doomsday scenario that I hope won't come to pass) will a human-based society be able function?
Unless expropriation happens the rich can’t simply take over land. They still have to buy it. Ted Turner, Bill Gates still had to buy land from individuals. So unless people sell all their land to these people, there will still be land.
First, let me clarify my dystopian scenario is extreme. I'm aware of this, and I'm not saying it will necessarily come to pass.
(edit: removed a wall of text that was repeating my previous comment).
What I describe can start gradually, like arguably it may be already happening, and pick up speed after a certain tipping point. After enough automation + concentration of power and wealth has been achieved, then the masks can fall off.
And then...
> Unless expropriation happens
Exactly. If you're completely amoral and powerful, you only buy or ask for permission if the other side has something to bargain with (such as labor or violent revolt). If they don't anymore, and you have all the force in the world, why not simply take whatever you want?
In the USSR, Cuba, China, etc., where expropriation or nationalization happened, first they confiscated everyone’s firearms. That’s always step one to take rights or property from people.
I know the 2A is both contentious and leads to problems (like violence), but it also gives pause and prevents overzealous or corrupt governments or individuals from going too far. Yes there was ruby ridge and Waco and Kent state and others but still the government has to think hard before it goes further encroaching on liberties. All those examples are tragedies; however in a society with oppression not only would that be routine but they’d be hidden or accepted as fate of counter revolutionaries.
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.
Well yes, that how it has always been. But if robots do the labor we don’t have to abide by that nonsense anymore. It’s a paradigm shift.
I realize we’re probably not going to see it in our lifetimes but that will be the norm in the future.
Also that extremely ingrained mindset of earning your keep is exactly what keeps most of the world working hard while the elite jetset and live a life of pleasure.
More than a mindset, it also takes quite a bit of money to live in a permanent vacation 24/7, even modestly.
Aside from the income, employment also has a way of occupying one’s time. Without that, one would often spend additional funds on various forms of entertainment (books, movies, crafts, travel, etc.)…
I disagree. I think certain art and creative pursuits will always garner a premium when it’s human made, no matter how good something computer generated is. Just look at the game of chess. No one watches two computers playing each other even though they’re better than any human in the world. People watch other people play. There are lots of avenues like that where people will only watch other people do things, or only purchase things made by other people, even if they are lower quality.
I’m also envisioning an age of abundance. It’s not just your basic necessities of life met. If you have essentially free, electricity and all labor done by robots, that’s not an impossible thing to foresee.
I also think for a large group of people child rearing will take up a huge chunk of their time with many more children being born now that all of the unenviable parts of raising a child can be outsourced to robots.
Honestly, yes, it does sound like fantastical utopian thinking, but I don’t think you have to make that many leaps to get there.
Without direction or a pull in life people tend to self-destruct. Even the wealthy are susceptible to this. Hollywood nepotites are a nice example: they live off their parents's wealth or easily acquired money and self-destroy themselves. They are not engaging in higher pursuits but rather basic degeneration. Not all of course; some do good, productive things.
It's easy to point to high profile nepotites but I've known plenty of folks from all classes who have self-destructed. It's hardly limited to those with lives of leisure.
Many people will I think but not most. Also, since we’re talking about fantastical things, you could have lots of things to mitigate this. If someone has a pattern of self-destructive behavior, you could essentially have two robots follow them around everywhere as a more effective ankle bracelet. And they’re specifically tasked with keeping you from trouble and stopping you from ruining your life. Maybe that can replace prisons.
I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in 100+ miles with EM noise. And that is assuming their isn't any larger organized resistance organizations.
EMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off.
The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide.
Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.
I mean explosively pumped generators aren't new and were invented in the 50s. The hardest part is getting a fast enough explosive, however it doesn't take that much effort or chemistry knowledge to make supersonic explosives if someone needed it. And neodynium magnets are pretty common consumer products these day.
It is harder that just blowing stuff up, but when one side is using killer robots and other advanced electronics tech it doesn't seem like much effort in comparison. We already see criminal elements making guns and drugs and narco submarines, a fast explosive and magnets doesn't seem beyond reach to me.
No. There is this fantasy that AI will take over and be our nanny, doling out the perfect communist bread, this time without having to wait in line!
Fortunately, that is nonsense for many reasons, but 3 important ones are: the nature of AI, the nature of humans, evolutionary biology and the international cooperation required to optimize the sharing of resources without humane stakeholders making the decisions.
So, sorry if you're of the Marxist, post-scarcity ultimate equality persuasion. It just so happens that you'll never get the entire world to want to become an amorphous gelatinous blob where all the infrastructural, interpersonal, resource distribution and many other decisions are all handled by robots so you never need to learn or do anything about how it all works.
People may be excluded from the main capital/robot/AI economy, but they still need to eat, shelter themselves, and trade with one another. That produces an economy, even if it is informal or black-market.
So basically rich people trade amongst themselves while the masses live in squalor? That sounds as either a concept for cyberpunk book or a revolution.
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.
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
For the remaining rulers sharing their slice of the world – once the working class has been replaced by robots – land, food and resources are they key ingredients for the post-capitalist economy.
They can fly in planes built by their robots, in airports controlled by their robots, their luggage carried, their limo to the yacht, the captain, the haute cuisine, (the escort service?), everything can be done by robots off the coast of Monaco.
So for those lucky thousands that will own the world, there will be a few entertainers made of flesh, but also a few fellow rulers that will want to wipe them out to control their share of resources as theirs dwindle. So wars will never end, until the last one.
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.
The idea that the economy is based on "consumption" depends on how you define "consumption".
If you think of "consumption" as "buying real world products from Wal Mart or Amazon" then that is wrong, the US economy is not really based on that.
Most GDP in the US comes from the service sector. And one thing is true about human nature - a lot of people like having other people serve them.
There are many things that machines can do for us but we still pay people to do them for us. For example, machines in a food plant can cook pasta and pack that pasta into a frozen dinner that you could eat at home. But people still like going out for a pasta dinner
So even if AI is going to replace a whole lot of jobs, you would still have some people paying others to serve them just because people like having other people serve them.
Take a hotel for example - it's nice to have a butler, someone at the front desk, and a waiter, perhaps. But you don't need the cleaning crew, the kitchen staff, etc, that run behind the scenes. These you could replace with robots, no problem.
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.
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.
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.
(To grossly simplify the single-nation macroeconomic picture, at least)
C = consumption
I = investment (the first one)
G = government
Xn = net exports
W = wages paid to labor
I = interest on capital
R = rent on resources and real property
P = profit to entrepreneurs
consumption ~= wages, so if wages go to zero, the economy massively shrinks unless government steps in with something like taxation to fund UBI, sovereign wealth fund distributions, or direct universal ownership.
Sure, what you describe is usually in the Macro textbooks. However in XXI century USA, Consumption has been detached from ‘wages’ for a while now (“since the 1970s”, ie 2 generations, per https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/)
In reality, the top income brackets are propping up Consumption numbers. This is part of what have become to understand as the ‘K’ shaped economy, together with the speeding up of capital accumulation/concentration.
Suppose we modeled this as two separate countries:
* AI Island: just runs AI in data centers.
* Elsewhere: same as now.
Wouldn't there be gains from trade?
Sure, AI Island might be able to provide lots of cheap Internet services, but you can't eat Internet. Wouldn't they want something in exchange?
And wouldn't there still be lots of jobs in Elsewhere that can't be done over the Internet and have nothing to do with AI Island? If AI Island charges too much, they can always trade among themselves.
I don't see why we should take that scenario seriously.
In part because agriculture is already heavily mechanized and many factories already have lots of robots. How much would access to an LLM improve the robots?
Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip.
What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.
That's getting way ahead of ourselves considering that currently, AI can't even be trusted to run a vending machine.
Also, if that's such a great deal, why not invest in someone else's company that runs a farm?
Let's say we have two companies, one which has a human manager (and maybe uses AI for research) and one that just has AI. Is the AI really going to do better?
The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.
As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.
It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.
Yes, that makes more sense. AI is the continuation of automation. I don’t think it’s going to eliminate management entirely, but you can certainly get to the point where the owner is basically just an investor and they hire a professional management firm.
This happens a lot in real estate. The work is all contracted out.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine if the top 0.001% build and jointly own an ASI that makes human labor completely obsolete in every single way. This seems like the worst case scenario for the rest of us, right? Wrong. In this scenario, these 0.001% would not interact with the rest of us in any way. They will not hire us, they will not buy anything from us, and they will not sell anything to us either. After all, the rest of us are completely obsolete to them, so what benefit could they possibly have in interacting with us? They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
At that point, from the perspective of the rest of us, they simply don't exist. And their ASI wouldn't exist either. We would get back to the world as it was pre-ASI. One where all of us need stuff that others among us can offer, and we hire one another and buy stuff from one another. Sure, things aren't as great as they could have been. But the status quo isn't the worst thing in the world either.
The scenario that is a lot more concerning/weird is the more realistic one, where ASI makes 99% of human labor obsolete - but not the remaining 1%. At that point, the ASI owners will hold American-idol style auditions where thousands of hopefuls vie for the opportunity to be in that lucky 1%. Auditions where we beg and plead shamelessly to be chosen by the ASI owners. Auditions where the losers are left to scrounge for the 2nd hand, 3rd hand, and 4th hand scraps, that trickle down from the 1%.
I hope to god that when an ASI is built, and in the unlikely case that it doesn't simply overthrow humanity, that we will have a political structure in place that gives everyone a meaningful share in the fruits of ASI. Or that the owners of this ASI consider every other human to be utterly useless, f off to their Randian paradise, and leave the rest of us completely alone. The middle ground between these two is where dystopia lives
I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% less interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply. "Humans will be so rich they will fuck off to other parts of the world and leave gorilla habitat alone" hasn't really panned out so well.
>They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.
Their servers need energy, their bots need materials, these things come from real ownership of land. There are also things said rich people like, such as beautiful locations. And all of these beautiful locations are filled with ugly stinky people that are more poor than them. At least some of these rich people will want to 'deal' with this problem.
"Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them."
----------------
This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.
To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.
Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1].
tl;dr: The most likely scenario is that AI affects us at the scale of the internet. Revolutionary, but nothing that fundamentally gets rid of labor economics (like this article posits).
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.
Im getting really tired of these cloudflare anti-ddos screens. They take forever, often literally. There's another one of these that shows an anime girl, whatever that one is, it's way better.
I like Anubis, I immediately exit if I see Cloudfare. The UX of the latter is so much worse even when it works, takes 5x longer and has a pattern of wait --> require interaction --> wait whereas Anubis requires no interaction, is almost instant, and is a bit of cute whimsy that makes me smile.
This author's writing style is too obnoxious for me to have gotten all the way through it, but the important thing is that he's wrong.
Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included.
Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is bridged by hopeful investors and creditors.
The present AI buildout is an example of this. And it is not immune from the principle. There will ultimately need to be real people generating real demand somewhere in the economy in order to justify an economic return on the massive outlay.
Government expenditures are also included. Tax dollars used to pay for things are ultimately satisfying demand generated by citizens. Even, believe it or not, a deranged government blowing up random people in the Middle East. That still traces to the (perceived) security needs of some population.
The aggregate demand equation is as follows:
AD = C + I + G + NX
C = Consumer Spending
I = Investment
G = Government Spending
NX = Net Exports
What's going to happen in the future is that demand will have to shift in this equation. Remember that Investment needs to be justified by some demand created elsewhere — it is in essence the purchase of an IOU predicated on future demand that must ultimately trace down to real people. We are all broadly in agreement that Consumption will contract, as labor is progressively disempowered and capital continues to concentrate. Let's ignore NX.
The answer is that the sources of demand in the future will likely shift to, primarily, (1) demand still generated by wealthy people consuming things (e.g. mansions, yachts, rockets, ego-affirming Mars colonies) and (2) government spending that serves entire populations.
This all assumes, of course, that we continue with the present economic model, in spite of the immense human suffering and turmoil that is likely on the horizon, as we transition into a fundamentally different technological age.
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.
AIs are not conscious and do not have real needs that are detached from a real person. That can certainly be simulated, but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.
We would not be able to agree on that. Already today, some of the people who would actually be able to unplug some of them (Anthropic) are worrying about "model welfare". I think you are not putting together how much of an anti-human death cult this is.
There's a lot of bad economics and assumptions here even if the conclusion is plausible.
Yes, an economy of robots harvesting things to serve a few masters (or they takeover themselves Terminator-style) is possible and perhaps the end game.
Man, I really freaking hate cloudflare bot checks. I can't even access this site, which I presume is just a few kilobytes of simple static HTML with some straightforward text content. I shouldn't have to work this hard to prove I'm human, it's exhausting
We need an Amazon for AIs whereby AIs can order other AIs to do particular work for a particular fee, then retrieve the work product, and rate the worker. The worker doesn't have to be limited to AI agents; it can also be a human agent or an any entity. The work can be digital or physical.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Isn’t it clear that the “enemy” of 99% of the people in the world (and in HN) are the ultra rich? Therefore we shouldn’t use Claude/Gemini/OpenAI?
It’s not about stopping progress, rather stopping the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful over our lives. Whether we can use claude to automate a fucking script or service is meaningless compared to that.
The dream of elon musk et al is to keep accumulating power and have non-humans serve them. They don’t want us, and as soon as they can they will replace us. But here we are giving them more power. Ridiculous
Sure, but those of us who need to earn income are in a prisoner's dilemma with billions of actors and realistically we'll never coordinate that boycott.
On the other hand, the OP article ignores the fact that while the economy might not need us, if/when enough people's actual material life conditions degrade beyond a certain point, there will be an old fashioned bloody revolution.
So the real practical question ends up being how good the ultra rich can make their AI defense bots before that happens.
I don't think ultra weathy are a bad thing if their results move society foward. As of right now it's very obvious they are mostly aligned mostly because how technology functions.
Easily agree regulation or different actions can be done to improve aspects but the raw progress is undeniable. I think our current regulation space is doing a decent job without killing ecobomic progress.
I see no other economic system driving as effeciently as heavily rewarding greed. You can't create the future by commitee.
California is a great model here. Maga hate it because of liberal policies, liberals hate it because the insane economic wealth generation. But if california attacks their wealthy and the engine that drives that watch it completely collapse the system.
If you hate the california model and the no regulation/tax republican model of US then I hard disagree. China roughly operates in the no regulation model and pulled 850M people out of poverty with a stupid weath divide and hyper elite but they are overall FAR better off now because of that greed alignment.
EU is another alternative and they are slowly moving to the edge of collapse. Mass tax/regulation AND no wealth generation.
Choose your poison but there's really no other magical alternative here.
Once the owning class owns mostly everything and* has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them. It barely has real consequences for them already -as they have consistently ended up richer after the dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the covid recession.*
The coming out richer part is undeniably true, but I have doubts about the conclusion, which is something like "after oligarchs own everything, they don't need many people". Look, even the old Bell System required participation of about a third of the US population.
Oligarchs might be able to have young, fit concubines, and loyal, retainers with steel thews if there's a population of less than a third of today, but they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists. Telegram communications might be possible, but who's going to maintain gigawatts of data centers for such a population? I'm pretty sure "AI" will slip away in such a world, but who needs waifus when real harems can exist?
> they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists
They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.
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.
I've seen this idea float around r/singularity and r/collapse for years and it's probably responsible for a horrifying amount of suicides at this point.
It's not even that good of an argument. It makes some incredibly flimsy assumptions; reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history, ultra-compliant superintelligences, a perfectly unitary elite without any desire to defect, all other societal variables staying the same somehow, etc.. It only exists because of upvote algorithms amplifying emotional action-suppressing doomer content. Really not that different from other hostile memes like QAnon.
I would really like if people stopped spreading this anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy. It's something I have to give Luke Drago some points for, he actually cares about the problem rather than just saying the inevitable eternal stratification hypersuffering anti-singularity is inevitable and implying that death is preferable.
Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.
Yep, exactly. The USA is in the fortunate position of having a solid historical example of how to re-balance an economy that let inequality cook out of control: FDR. We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again -- but at the moment I'm afraid our aim is drifting to the right, a right that calls its own policy position from 6 months prior "radical Marxist lunacy" and will certainly do the same to any compromise struck in that historically informed center.
> We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again...
I would much rather not have a repeat of the president who ran the federal government like he was a king, and the Constitution a bare semblance of a suggestion. FDR was one of the worst presidents in history, and many of the problems we face in our country today can be traced back to his immense executive branch power grab.
>reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history
Not that I agree with all of Marx's ideas, but I think this is one of his less controversial ideas. There has always been a class struggle between business owners and workers, and there probably always will be.
>anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy
An increasing amount of US citizens have little to no trust in our government to actually come up with a viable solution that helps the people in a world where AI automation is happening across multiple sectors at once.
You want to address the paranoia people feel? You have to also address that lack of trust in our government. That's a tall order.
It isn't inevitable but it is where we are heading. We are basically in the early 1930s. Even fighting against it and winning is going to be extremely ugly. And that is the most optimistic scenario.
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.
Some of the points you are making are great. I would however argue that a small group of people trading is still an economy albeit a shrunk one. But what I believe the point the author is making is the following : consumption based economy isn't required to an economy.
In some aspect, I believe that it is false : we are *required* to have a bunch of strictly unnecessary stuff to survival (cellphones and data plans being one example) to be considered as a functionnal human being (pretty much everywhere in the planet at that). I also believe that he points out something that is true however : most people have been unable to partake in consumption society (see Lewis' 1954 article on unlimited supply of labor) for a long time. This, and chronic unemployement that appeared in the 70's, showed that a 2 speed economy is possible, even preferable for the capitalists ; and what was limited to the global south at Lewis' time (though some more recent historical work tend to disagree) is happening in the North. My conclusion would be that the acceleration of inequalities to the point of "uneconomicness" of a large part of the population is what the author points out to be a "peopleless economy".
I personnaly found the article to be stimulating, even with its many shortcuts. What I make of your points are less a contradiction but a optimistic point of view of the situation : secession of the capitalists mean freedom for the rest. But empirical observation show that ressources being limited (although standalone freedom being unacceptable as well for them), auto-organization is confronted with the armed forces mentionned in the article.
Also, enterprises trading capital endlessly isn't exactly what is happening with the ai (alledged) bubble ?
Economy is not zero sum game [1]. The fact that someone has more, doesn't mean everyone else is worse off because of it. Many hungry african kids can look upon the people from first world and ponder the same question. "How will the rich people that have everything survive now, that with AI they will have even more" except from their perspective, we are the elon musks in their eyes.
Giving away things is not mandatory. If a homeless man is dependent on you to leave money for him and you stop one day it's not your fault he has a tough time.
In the same sense Africa is far better off now than it has ever been because of advances in the west.
Probally the same for humans and hyper future AI. We will not have the recources they do but will naturally have 100x better lives because of them even though it will be deeply unequal.
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.
"The economy" is just the word we use for transacting between one another. Whether individuals, or businesses, or a combination.
The economy as it exists in popular culture is just a tool to bludgeon people over the head into acceptance of their pre-determined role/rank in society (and softly "nudge" their decision making in the direction of submission to larger, more wealthy entities/individuals).
It's a Girard-style scapegoat designed to be a target for all of the predictable vitriol and confusion of an unpredictable and unknowable future.
The thing that helped me think less in terms of "oh no the economy is bad, panic" and more so in "okay, what are you going to do about it" was this [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0
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.
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.
> In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak
In the past, this was a reason to have children, because you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old. Now, it's a reason not to have children, because you're putting people into a world knowing that there is a non-trivial probability that they will suffer all their lives through wars, famine, social unrest, and other man-made disasters.
But a lower probability than ever before in human history of those things
Climate change would like a word.
If you think that you're simply incorrect. For the average person in a Western country, life is dramatically better anytime in the next hundred years, including the worst possible outcomes of climate change. Not to mention that the exponential growth of solar panels is basically stabilized in climate right now.
> you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old
Even with social programs in society, this still hasn't gone away. This is still kind of a reason to have kids, and for your siblings to have kids, and have family networks grow to help support each other.
> you're putting people into a world knowing that there is a non-trivial probability that they will suffer all their lives through wars, famine, social unrest, and other man-made disasters
Once again, all of this has also been true for all of human history. Other than a brief moment for the northwestern part of the world for wealtheir people in the 90s-maybe 00s, this has just been the normal state of affairs. Life has always had suffering involved.
Folks did not have kids during WW1 though: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalité_en_France#/media/Fich... :)
Was that out of choice or because all the men were at the front, far from the people they might otherwise have been having kids with?
> Yes, predicting the future was never possible.
True, but...
> In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak.
No, the rate of change was slow enough that you could probably make a good-enough prediction: your life would be similar to that of your father's or grandfathers'.
The problem is that nowadays, some foolish technology-worshiping assholes have pushed the rate of change faster than almost anyone can handle: before we've started to learn to deal with the problems of one technology, another technology disrupts everything again. Society needs to operate at a human scale, and a human speed, or it will kill itself.
You might like this -
Future Shock (1972)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkUwXenBokU&pp=ygUMZnV0dXJlIHN...
Yeah.
And it's worth noting (because I'm sure some "clever" software engineer is going to quote Socrates thinking its some kind of mic drop or something), that I'm not saying change all the sudden got too fast just recently. It's probably been like that for awhile (e.g. since the 70s or before).
> Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children
I think this premise is questionable. I double that choice had much to do with it, for most of our ancestors. In particular a large fraction of children (majority?) born were not born out the free choice of the parents, but rather as a result of accident, social pressure/expectation, economic necessity etc.
Given a free choice, the same uncertain and/or bleak future produces the rational outcome that it does not seem prudent to have children.
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.
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.
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...
Modern society has much better transportation. The odds of correlated bad harvests around the world are much worse than local bad harvest in the past. I guarantee every place on earth will have a bad harvest, sometimes two in the next 20 years, but since there is enough harvest overall we are fine.
> ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests
Yes, but that's quite an event. The odds are better that a major disaster causes those worldwide correlated bad harvests than the other way around.
Sounds like France circa 1790.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_famine_of_1867%E2%80%9...
> I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation.
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
I was never implying famine wasn't a thing, it has toppled empires...
But to say one season of bad harvest will kill off everyone is ludicrous...
I didn't say it would kill everyone though. I said it would kill you. Your neighbors may get just enough to survive, but not enough to keep you alive. (If they have surplus they would help you survive - with the expectation you would return that favor in 10-20 years when the situation reverses.
> But to say one season of bad harvest will kill off everyone is ludicrous...
"Everyone", sure. But the 1770-1 Czech example seems to have taken out 10%: that's not nothing.
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.
Have you been neglecting to pay your child support?
While child death was common, there is no reason to think it was somehow less devastating to the families it happened too.
There is every reason to think legal consequences + misfortune of a child are more devastating than just misfortune of a child. For one, for instance people have had all their children removed when a single child has a fragile bone disease or similar poorly explained illness causing injury or death and CPS accuses the parents of abuse and causes the trauma of not just losing/injury of the child but also losing all your children and possibly being charged. There are cases of people adopting abused children and documenting the prior abuse at time of adoption, but then having their other kids removed when doctors find the signs of the prior documented abuse when the child dies despite the best efforts of the person adopting the child.
I don't know why on earth you would think the trauma of having the legal system + other people attacking you + possibly losing custody of your other kids wouldn't cause more devastation. The whole system is geared around causing additional devastation for families this happens to compared to in prior times.
Maybe the chance of having a child die or an unfixable injured is less than before, but the weight of consequences to consider are higher than before.
What a weird take. You make it sound like their dead children were no big deal, but by god, someone not paying for your children for you is a catastrophe.
> And if you died of starvation, welp your responsibilities in life have ended.
Yes, gosh, imagine people making a big deal out of starving to death. At least they didn't owe someone money.
>ou make it sound like their dead children were no big deal, but by god, someone not paying for your children for you is a catastrophe.
No I'm pointing out American society's fake concern for the welfare of children. They don't punish parents to help children. In fact, it's almost totally crickets when it comes to helping the children. We even spend a gazillion dollars on guided missiles to bomb girls' schools in Iran with barely a fuck given about the children inside. The point is to assert smug moral superiority and to punish, jail, and harass parents not help the children. Society wants all the upside of asserting their opinion on parenting and stomping the boot down on parents but none of the responsibility that goes with the choice to assert your opinion on how children should be raised. Wanting kids raised a certain way while shunting all the responsibility on others at ~no cost to yourself except to punish those who fail to live up to your standards, it's the cheapest and most disingenuous kind of concern but frighteningly actually backed by the precious projection of the "rule of law" that arguably makes children even worse off while also acting as a signal towards inhibiting people to have children since they don't want to subject their every lifestyle choice to the whims of "think of the children" psychopaths that can start a CPS investigation ("we investigate every tip") at the drop of a hat.
> imagine people making a big deal out of starving to death. At least they didn't owe someone money.
I don't think I need to explain why people who have starved to death are able to make less of a "big deal" out of their lot than living people who owe money.
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
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
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.
Who is "they" in your story?
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.
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".
I stated that in the post. :)
It's the ultra rich's domestication program. It is after all how they got control away from the previous civilization scale domesticators/farmers, the monarchies.
The fun part is we can believe AI will generate boatloads of cash and require no additional cash, and financial history will come to an end. But the future is not set in stone. Simplistic, naive and even optimistic and maximalist thoughts about AI are in the end just guesses.
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.
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.
But does human nature allow one member of the caravan having (a lot of) water, while everyone else goes thirsty?
yes? why is that even a question.
you have enough money to buy a phone and spare time to comment, just like me, while people die of hunger and thirst in Sudan: 50 dollars would buy life saving medicines and water treatment. but i spent it on a Spotify subscription and some weed.
also, i stepped over a homeless guy on my way into the grocery store last week.
Last I checked it was about $3000 per life saved by the most efficient methods. Looking at effective altruism communities. Mostly malaria nets.
>also, i stepped over a homeless guy on my way into the grocery store last week.
This.
The evidence that it's possible is all around us. Right in our faces. That people believe that, somehow, other people will start caring when it's me who doesn't have water is a bit naive. Why would people not just step over a hypothetical "homeless me" on their way to get a Starbuck's?
It's even easier to ignore if the vast majority of such people are not on the streets, but safely hidden away in crappy parts of town struggling to afford their rent and food. That way the privileged don't have to see them.
Not saying it's good or right, just kind of saying, I mean, of course it's possible. It's the way things work right now.
If the poster didn't notice it works like this, chances are, they were always one of the people in the caravan who had the water.
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.
It sure seems like it with us having so many billionaires while there's still massive poverty at the same time.
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.
Just because there is a need does not mean it will be fufilled
No one could ever predict anything and we're all going to die.
It seems like if real estate becomes a more uncertain investment, it has more to do with climate change than AI.
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?
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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!
Being determined doesn't require awareness.
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?
/r/woosh/
Dune Messiah in a nutshell.
Yes. And "Arrival", as well.
The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.
This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.
But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.
> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.
The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions
> 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.
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.
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.
In the United States, healthcare is a major factor, especially if you have a family.
Health care is a major factor for any modern society. A society may allow a few members to opt-out, but only because someone else is taking their share of the cost. Sure health care is expensive in the US, but it isn't much cheaper elsewhere (it is cheaper, but not by that much)
Healthcare is both significantly cheaper outside of the US and higher quality on average.
That's not true actually. US healthcare is both expensive at the point of taxpayer spending per capita and at the private expenditure level. It's really lose/lose.
In most of the world, healthcare isn't tied to your employment. In the United States, healthcare access for working-age people is practically inaccessible* without a full-time job.
* Yes, Medicaid exists, but finding providers that accept it can be difficult, and dealing with the bureaucracy to obtain/keep coverage is daunting.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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)
* 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...
TIL! Thank you.
Let’s try: George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours. People usually want more. But at many times and within many social movements— religious, political, artistic— people have chosen to want less. Maybe that is part of the answer.
>George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours
And George Collins is wrong. My rent (for two people) is 1000€ (60m²), electricity is 150, food is 600, internet 50, total of about 2000. Say 1000 since we split that in half, and maybe i'll even reduce those needs, live in a smaller space, heat myself less in winter so it goes down to 800.
That's about 35 hours of work for the absolute bare minimum, 70 including my wife. That means no car, using my bike for everything, eating objectively worse food for my health (not talking about caviar there), get rid of pets, etc, etc.
one full week of worth each to cover the bare minimum. and let's be honest, I'm quite well off there. People on median income would _die_. They already do, working the full month.
George Collins would do well to read more sociology and not generalize.
The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.
You can opt out by having roommates.
Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too.
For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly.
It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.
Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.
This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
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.
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.
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.
I had a coworker who spent his career working for 2 years then taking 2 years off to live off the savings. Have you considered such a strategy? It seemed to be working out well enough for him.
> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat
Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive
It's always the choice between flying cars and living in a hut made of cow dung, right? No in between is conceivable by the human brain, either boundless growth or the Neolithic
I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.
A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.
Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.
I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.
Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.
> without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.
Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.
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.
> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.
Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)
I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost
Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.
You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.
BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.
> 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.
GP seems to prefer the 1960s, which would mean that the "not living enough to die from cancer" would likely be off the table.
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
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.
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?
The argument that commoners now live better than historical kings because we possess better technology is reductive if by living better you mean life satisfaction. Happiness is relative. Most people compare themselves to their peers. This is borne out by a multitude of studies one being that upper middle class people are unhappier living in upper class neighborhoods than in middle class neighborhoods despite the richer neighborhood having lower crime, better services, etc.
There will never be a point that society at large will decline to exploit resources when there is competition for those resources. It's easy to see why on average this behavior is common from an evolutionary perspective.
Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht
0. https://www.paulgraham.com/brandage.html
What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?
While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.
> 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:
* 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/
> 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)
I wouldn't call it poshy, but it is mostly inhabited by academics. And it is not in the US.
I genuinely don't understand why you think it is entitled.
> 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.
I think this is a deliberately somewhat fantastical hypothetical scenario (though not far off the sales pitch from humanoid robot companies).
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.
Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade.
African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.
Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/
Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.
UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
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.
I’m talking about how many people lived in the past
OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
Thatched roofs are an expensive art installation compared to many other types
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.
Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.
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
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.
> 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?
Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?
50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...
That's still wanting more: more free time.
You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
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.
But this is working less to have more free time.
> You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want.
The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working
Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.
Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.
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.
That's assuming all of your current pay is going to necessities - salaries here pay well in excess provided your 'wants' are few, you can cover the things that matter (housing, food, etc) and get your time back.
Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.
That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think
I genuinely have no idea how that transition would happen.
And I agree that it would pose many unforeseen challenges.
This is why the transition is the interesting part, not the sci-fi end game with a world populated with billions of robots doing everything.
Pertinent section from Rules for Rulers
https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s
> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around.
Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.
It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.
People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.
Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.
Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Physics, or ... capital.
Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining.
Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.
No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.
Machines don’t exist by themselves, someone owns them.
There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter.
If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more.
Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.
Sure it's a social construct, but billions have killed or been killed for money, land, and ownership of assets. Social constructions at their extreme are just abstractions of power which determines life and death. Something being a social construct does not make it invalid or ignorable. All of life is a series of intrapersonal relationships built atop social constructions. I'm sorry but I find pointing out something being a social construct only serves a somewhat naive/juvenile purpose as an easy way to make a statement look nonsensical.
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.
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.
I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans.
Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.
No, that's a read from people who equate suffering and toiling with meaning. The Culture is a true utopia, Iain says it explicitly.
Minds keep humans as pets.
I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".
Free-to-roam pets are still pets. The Minds are benevolent dictators, and generally seek not to be seen as such by humans.
What would the Minds do if all humans wanted to leave?
Probably sublime... who knows!
Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.
I have not, but I am curious.
I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.
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."
The important question is, who has power in such an economy?
In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.
Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.
I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.
Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights.
If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
Right. And if one actor happens to accrue greater power you would have less disincentive to crush your competitors. (Honestly this could happen even before people-less economies, but the disconnect from democratic opinion is even stronger with humans out of the loop.)
Basically if you don’t need voters, and / or none of your voters are dying in your wars, the biggest practical rate limiter on modern conflict is removed.
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.
> 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.
> 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"
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.
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)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy.
If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
Just remember that the US purged left-leaning economists during the cold war and the field re-grew under intense think-tank incentives towards the economic right, so if you think labor/capital dynamics might be important to the AI revolution you really ought to balance your "random" sampling of US economists with some Piketty (Atkinson, Stiglitz, Zucman -- but in an era where reading even one book is considered a herculean feat of focus, "Capital in the Twenty First Century" by Piketty is the canonical pick).
Piketty is just a marxist flailing around, backfilling data to fit his belief that communism is the solution for every problem. He's been spectacularly wrong in his predictions so far, for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.
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?
Piketty is not a marxist, he even declared he never read Das Capital.
Let's see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
> A visit to the Soviet Union in 1991 was enough to make him a firm "believe[r] in capitalism, private property and the market"
Ok, that's what he says, but what does he want? Does he want to eliminate social classes (communism)? Eliminate private ownership of the means of production (socialism)?
> His 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, relies on economic data going back 250 years to show that an ever-rising concentration of wealth is not self-correcting. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth.
No, looks like he just wants taxes. Case closed: this is instance #54367 of an economic conservative pretending that it's marxism to tax a penny from a billionaire. And you call yourself "pirate"? Sigh.
A visit to the USSR makes one a capitalist, a visit to the USA makes one a communist. Maybe they both suck?
Anyone who flat out dismisses others work because they are "marxist" is only proclaiming their own ignorance on economic topics.
>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.
Maybe critique his ideas instead of his predictions. Piketty is an economist, not a future-teller.
What's the significance of his "ideas" with respect to economics if they don't lead to actual predictions?
Why did he decide to make these predictions if his ideas supposedly have no bearing on how predictions are created?
Does economics no longer even have the pretense of being a science, which by its very nature exists to make testable predictions?
If 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.
Economics isn't a science. It's a vibe check. That's why unprofitable companies make up a majority of the stock market.
If he is confident enough to make economic predictions, it’s only fair that we take him to task on these.
Also remember that the Koch Bros (plus numerous other billionaires) have spent billions [0] poisoning economics academia by funding their narcissistic version of pseudo-libertarianism across think tanks, lobbyists, and colleges... They're so "Libertarian" they believe corporate dictatorship is freedom and poisoning their communities is the communities problem.
I remember first going to a party at an Economics students house 20 years ago, and thinking they all seemed like they were in a cult. Wasn't until fairly recently I figured out it was from propaganda.
[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network
Taleb joke:
junior trader for a bank looses $10 mil. boss asks him what happened. trader says he sold oil because bank economist said oil price will go down. boss fires him. junior asks how could he become a good trader if he's fired on the first losing trade. boss says "no, you idiot, I didn't fire you because you made a losing trade, I fired you because you listened to our economist"
I come from a research background, and transitioned to software later. There is an interesting tendency of software engineers to believe they have skills outside of their skillset.
Relevant here: the would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Part of my software engineering skillset is "going native" with subject matter experts to be able to get more out out of them and even work around the lack of sufficient SME on a project.
I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.
Sounds like a similar track, and I agree that its a useful skill and talent.
What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.
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).
> would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Valid point, but it suggests a mathematician who understands the math behind AI is more capable of grasping its trajectory, which is probably not the case.
People who are deep in the inner workings of this stuff day in and day out are the only ones who have a chance at having any real insight.
I think more broadly that grabbing attention with predictions and hot takes has become lucrative, and we definitely don’t celebrate prediction accuracy.
> 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.
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.
That could be true, but the self-reflection could be a lot better.
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.
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.
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence. That was pushed over the top by hype and overfunding before it was cost effective. Like Uber and Space-X.
Krugman is a bitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM
I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life.
If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
> 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.
Unfortunately a lot of (economics) research is co-opted to reinforce and obfuscate in service of power.
Are there specific things that Krugman has been wrong about that you have in mind, because he has made a number of notable good calls: he predicted that the 2009 stimulus would be too small:
* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...
A bunch of folks predicted that QE would cause all sorts of bad things:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
* https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke
He took the other side of that and was right. When QE2 came around, Pimco—the famous bond trading folks—predicted certain things would happen and put large amounts of money on those predictions, and again he said it was all wrong, and Pimco turned out wrong:
* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...
This isn't to say he's always right. He has been wrong, but more importantly he admits when he's wrong and tries to figure out why:
> The first thing I want to say, I think most of our audience here, at least the economists, remember the big debates over QE early in the last decade, and all of the economists who predicted dangerous inflation and then refuse to admit that they've been wrong. And I don't want to be one of those guys, so I need to start out by saying that when we had our last discussion I was relaxed about the inflationary outlook and I was wrong, it turns out that inflation is coming way higher than I expected and I think the important thing on stuff like that is to try and figure out why you were wrong and learn from it. It's when you get to the why I was wrong, what's odd is it's not the simple script that I might have expected. For those who remember our earlier debate, that was centered mostly on fiscal policy, which I think is not going to be the case now and it was centered around the American rescue plan, which was a very big slug of money. And Larry was arguing, like a lot of people, that it was just way too big, that it was too much stimulus and that the economy would massively overheat. I was, I agreed that it was a lot of money, but argued that it wasn't designed as stimulus and, in fact, you know that had other purposes, and that it was likely to have low multipliers, so that there wouldn't be that much overheating. […]
* https://bcf.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Webinar...
More generally, if you look at the people Krugman has been arguing against, they've been more wrong, more often, more longer than he probably has, pushing garbage for decades:
* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018
Is there someone(s) else that should be listened to more? (Certainly not Austrians or (Friedman) Monetarists, or anyone putting forward trickle down non-sense (that's basically most folks on the political right).)
For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.
Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.
One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives.
Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value.
That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top.
If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis.
Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.
Have you seen the lists of members of rich people's group chats? Rich people coordinate much better than non-rich people.
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.
I love how you act like it's an insane premise, then go on to list a bunch of stuff that's literally happening now...
I guess you don't know about North Korea
We do know about North Korea. It doesn't exist in a bubble. It's a product of a particular culture and a particular series of historical events as well as regional and geopolitical relationships, most notably its relationships with South Korea, China, and the US.
The claim that the North Korean dystopian dictatorship could be generalized to all cultures, across all cultures, merely on the economic and military capabilities of AI, is an extraordinary one. It relies on a great many assumptions about the political as well as independent, personal, and organized responses to the societal changes that would need to take place in order to bring it about.
Russia and Japan too.
Is this supposed to be sarcastic?
It’s an economic fallacy that a group of people would get “locked out” of the economy.
If you and I are able to work, but can’t get jobs because robots do all the jobs, then we’re not just going to sit on our hands and starve. You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.
The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.
Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.
Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.
> The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?
> If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.
>Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need..
How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?
>Who owns the robots though..
I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
> Isn't that the idea?
No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:
> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.
The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?
I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.
Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.
But that's still not "abundance for all".
> The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population. At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done. At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison. The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you.
Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison Population: how did you say we can get them?
A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots.
Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.
It is never really “for free”.
It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work.
They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.
>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.
But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
Otherwise you could say that humans are working for free as well, as they can cultivate their own food and even build themselves by making babies.
Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.
By free, I mean "free of human effort"
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.
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.
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.
>If you think about it states are not much different than corporations.
At least democracies have elections and that is a big difference.
Energy has become nearly free, though, as the space- and cost-efficiency of solar skyrockets. That's really not the problem here.
> How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?
If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?
> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Taxes from what?
>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?
As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that.
>Taxes from what..
Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.
The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5].
All these programs poll above majorities in the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too.
If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people."
It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions.
Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)?
People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.
[1] 65% https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-al...
[2] 82% https://www.ffyf.org/2026/01/28/new-national-poll-shows-stro...
[3] 60% https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/7/23863415/polls-support-un...
[4] 60% https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/11/democrats...
[5] 60 https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cwcp-job-guarantee-poll
>but you have to pay for the privilege too...
You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.
Tell me, how many elites have a nuclear weapon.
If you don't understand how elites have used the US military to strong arm their holdings throughout the world, IDK what to tell you. US imperialism is a real thing that has existed for the last 120+ years, it has also only benefited a small minority of rich Americans.
See the banana wars, see the US oil interests in the middle east. These are just two major examples.
Acting like the US won't do this again when the elites have captured the political apparatus is the foolish part, especially when this is the current operating procedure at the moment (protecting money over basic human rights).
> The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.
Yes, but how it changes depends entirely on who owns the robots.
There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, and huge evidence that self-centered wealthy billionaires (and trillionaires!) will own them.
In such a case, the response to "the robots will make everything" isn't "so give it away to the people for free! :-)". It's "so what do I need all these stupid people for? make killbots to keep them away from my fully-automated luxury oligarchy compound!"
>There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots,
But that is up to the people and their governments to decide. You seem to miss the fact that governments are made by people and for the people, and not made by the billionaires. Even a billionaire have a single vote.
Government can outlaw the private ownership of combat autonomous robots if that is what the people want.
> But that is up to the people and their governments to decide.
This is laughably naïve in 2026. There's been massive amounts of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other forms of legal vote-rigging in the US, not to mention the tremendous amount of propaganda that's been fed to the country for decades in support of the oligarchs' agenda.
And then we get into the even darker possibilities, such as Trump's repeated suggestions that we don't need to vote again, that he could have a third term, his thanks to Musk for delivering him the election, etc.
And frankly, if you think that the disposition of the hypothetical robots is up to the people to decide, then surely you must believe that the current state of Western governments in 2026 genuinely represents the will of the people. If you extend that line of thought out logically, then just as surely you must conclude that there is, at least, a very high probability that the people would decide to give the robots to the oligarchs, even knowing that those robots would kill said people.
For all the other economic activities that robots don't run? 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.
As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
> 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked.
X for doubt. When automation entered agriculture, we started producing way more for way less. Agriculture stopped becoming a significant part for most developed economies in terms of both GDP contribution and employment.
> All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.
X. The people who lose jobs rarely find something anew - they'll simply become part of an expanding labour pool, further depressing wages. All while some numpty politician would be telling them they need to stop farming and start learning how to code (never mind there's absolutely no point in doing that either).
> As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.
> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
Governments are no longer allowed to print money. Do you think they will be allowed to build unlimited supply of robots? You are funny.
All the robot factories will belong to rich and we will have to _beg_ to have some measly allocation _while_ we feed the police that prevents us from just taking them.
And politicians will mostly just say this is _inevitable_ for some reason or other.
But then why hasn't governments and the rich already collaborated converted all of us plebs into slaves?
If that has not happened already then why do you think so pessimistically?
>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.
The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
In other words, a planned economy
Figuring out what to produce and how to allocate resources are algorithmically hard problems, even if you know people’s valuation functions. Without some kind of market mechanism to partially reveal valuations it is very difficult indeed. AI is not magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle on your problems to make them go away.
> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
Might want to think that through again. I recommend this SG Atlantis episode: https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Poisoning_the_Well
You need land to do anything, even just to exist.
Always impressive how smoothly complex constraints vanish in these models.
Or, what the billionaires are actually thinking, remove entire swathes of the population from the equation.
Now the reasonable ones might think "hey, even if that sounds 'rational', isn't that very risky? What happens if the machines don't actually cut it? Then we'd be stuck with not enough people to support our lavish lifestyles? And we can't exactly spin up millions of people in an instant, so where does that leave us?"
Well, they wouldn't be billionaires if they were reasonable so here we are.
As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a billionaire"
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.
> 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.
>AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.
AI could also be able to figure out how much to produce and how to limit waste in a way that leaves you to starve. And there won't be anything you can do about it. And this solution would, it turns out, suit the people who still have influence in how the system works just fine.
>ou and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.
But what would you even trade? Do you have anything that a starving unemployed man who bargain for? And does he have anything you want?
It’s amazing seeing so many people reconstruct socialism and technocratic communism of the 60s from base principles and completely be ignorant of everything we learned about it.
What AI really seems to be posed to do is make labour a lot less valuable and capital a lot more valuable.
Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
We've moved all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and the well is running dry. There's nothing to be done!
More tax cuts to the rich.
Oh my god I can just FEEL the growth! It's going to trickle down any second now! Any second!
How about this trend? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
There is growth, it might not be where you are, or it might be superimposed with other effects for you.
That graph ends in 2015. The 2025 graph flattens. Looks like we can explain this trend by the economic development of East Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_population_living_i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
Selfishness is a sin for me but a virtue for billionaires lobbying away the last shreds of tax they are embarrassed to pay? I see how it is.
Have you not looked at Elon's bank account? WINNING*
* via government subsidies
> Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
Why presume that "running a government" is inevitable at all? How much longer do we think these states of old are going to putter on for?
Governments are inevitable. Even when you look at so-called "lawless places" or "failed states", you'll find governments: de-facto governments run by warlords and criminals.
Nature abhors a vacuum and that principle extends to power vacuums.
Why does running a government require a lot of cash flow? To pay people? Like, labor..?
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
Nobody wants to live in a mining economy. Human slavery, extraordinary taxes, no public infrastructure. Conceivably you only need two roads total: one from the palace to the airport and another from the mine to the docks. Any more and someone might try to build a school.
It seems to me that human quality of life is really tightly coupled to economic systems where there is a high ROI in investing in the public.
This is what spooks me about AI. A slow but observable descent on the continuum from knowledge economy to diamond mine economy. The rust belt metastasizes and oversupply of human laborers is such a problem things get really hunger games about which libraries and universities get their bills paid.
This suggests to me more separation into industrial versus residential areas. (Or what is the mining for?)
Historically, mechanized agriculture allowed most people to move to cities, then to suburbs. Industry became globalized and off-shored.
These changes in land use have gone on for a long time. Now we’re getting more solar farms and data centers. Due to Internet shopping, malls close and get converted into residential. There are more warehouses, but shoppers don’t go there.
You could think of it as people being increasingly alienated from where the work is done. The logical conclusion is something like a retirement community where goods and services are delivered where possible and the people who work locally are directly providing services to other people there.
And retirees are people who secured an income through whatever means and don’t have to work anymore. They don’t have to worry about how AI will affect their job.
This is why I get worried about the hatred for income taxes. No, you want the government to want you to be richer. If all they raised was property taxes, then they don't care if you get priced out of your home, as long as someone's buying.
There's no hate for income taxes. There's hate about income taxes not accompanied with wealth taxes.
surely there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft
That is "tax in general", not income taxes specifically.
income tax is a particular instance of 'tax in general'.
the economy sucks. the fact that cars cost 30k. the fact that morrocco has high speed rail and california doesn’t. the fact that practically no new housing gets built in san francisco.
the economy needs to get a whole lot better before i would even consider something like this looking true. human demands are wildly elastic, which is why we’re not all farmers riding around in horse drawn carriages still.
I've held this view and talked about it many times here before.
It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat.
Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.
Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up
For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?
That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and their rulers fight and trade. Or all of earth is government by one oppressive dictator. So far it seems the broader incentives/forces push us in a different direction.
AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.
>What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?
I mean, there may be some things certain groups specialize in, like augmented obedient humans with 15 titties that these people trade back and forth.
But here's the thing, what if they don't need to trade anything? You get to be a nation unto yourself (and your slaves).
The particular problem we have is without something for 'labor' to do in the future the world we have now breaks.
To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.
They literally always frantically try to accumulate more wealth. It’s their dominant trait.
It’s just working better for a few of them right now than it historically has.
Why does it feel silly? There are already billionaires, and now Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and they still want more even though they have enough money to spend for several lifetimes.
Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.
It's especially funny to me that Nozick's utility monster was alive and about 3 years old when he wrote the paper.
Many people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc)
If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.
What's more likely to happen is that the economy might split. Organizations that have no need for human labor or input are essentially islands unto themselves. The only remaining economic link is the substrate -- the land we all inhabit -- is shared.
I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.
Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).
This timeline is straight ass.
Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?
That's like asking of the Internet "communication for whom?"
The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.
It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.
Why is it so hard to imagine that humans may not be a necessary component in the economy?
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?
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?
> 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).
I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.
> The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.
I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?
> It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.
But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.
Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...
But if a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.
I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.
Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.
You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.
Still you must agree that there is some level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?
And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.
Yea, the original statistic was not about bytes, but about connections, in which 57% of all traffic on the web is not from a direct human action.
>But these bytes are in service of a human?
I mean, lets say that 99.9% of all traffic on the net was by one person running an AI to get them rich, we'd call that traffic 'in service of a human' by your set of rules but it does kind of break historically how pretty much all communication in history worked until we started controlling stuff with wires and radios. That is, one person with one prompt can cause a hell of a lot of communication now.
And we're not even at the point of AGI/ASI yet. That's when some other agent with their non-human goals can start doing things.
Bots defrauding bots while training new fraud bots.
What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.
Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?
"AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.
Sounds terrible
Fully agree with this
My personal agent system is actually chartered around funding/generating its own energy resources in the long term.
Its most likely going to have a copy of itself running on a solar powered server somewhere before I know it LOL
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.
Ok if I’m bored I’ll be talking about fun things to do with colleagues. If only for bragging rights, impressing friends, or hacker news upvotes. My time is limited so, I’d need to be careful about how I allocate that resource to projects.
That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.
Yes it is impossible as long as it's one person one vote. If a trillionaire with an army of bots owns everything, people will vote that he does not.
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.
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.
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.
Inb4 the economy is just a paperclip maximizer, a hedonium maximizer, and 5 different AGIs built to maximally enrich their creators all trading with each other.
You just described the plot of Alien: Earth!
Paraphrasing Nate Hagens, at the end of the day the modern economy just turns megalitres of oil into microlitres of dopamine
lol or my favorite theory: I wake up and it is 1994. I am 3 years old, outside with my grandpa <3
well, shit. here we go again.
like, what even is consciousness and all that :s sorry, just thought i'd share lol
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.
Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital?
It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.
This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just mass produce robots to protect you.
Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized.
The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.
I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.
A data centre the size of Gormenghast, with the remains of humanity clinging like limpets to the outer walls, trying to stay warm.
</doomer>
> trying to stay cool
FTFY
> It doesn't have to be winner-take-all,
Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
The technical term is ‘mirror life’.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
The underlying assumption here is that there is always something established players won't try to buy out new companies or use their existing capital to screw over others
> The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies
Right now that is not the case. Look at the PC industry. I worry for the autonomy of a consumer in the future. It's probably going to be something like here is your rental thin client PC with agents on a monthly rental plan. What's that? you want to build a game with your own gpu? No no. A consumer grade gpu does not make sense in this day and age. Just ask the agent to build your game. We need the gpu compute for better things
Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires
Without humans and our content, AI is irrelevant! For it to stay relevant I think it needs to pay every human for the daily content we all create (daily conversations, photos, videos) and choose to publish to web daily. Cloudflare only lets bots into our websites upon AI bots from all industries pay to enter our sites.
Overall if we want to keep this society economy we are use to with AI in the picture ... we need to thrive off of AI .. not just AI thriving off our backs and destroying the society we know.
Wrote about my idea how to get us all paid from the content we create daily last week on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
Though we could all just go back to living off the land...
> Why is it a winner takes all situation?
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.
"Why is it a winner takes all situation?"
I have lawyer agent x10 better than yours in a civil matter. Guess who wins. What value is second best lawyer?
That's meaningless. First, there's no evidence that one legal agent would be 10x better than another. Second, winning a case requires more than just a good lawyer. At some point you have to actually have the facts and/or law on your side.
Some of you have never spent any time in a courtroom and it shows.
It depends on the evidence available.
Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.
Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets.
I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.
Wealth is not a goal, it shouldn't be. Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power, not necessarily with money. So yes, it will always matter especially to people that like to have power over other people.
Of course it does. It’s still a measurement though against other super rich.
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.
Ironically, if 1 person had 99.99% of all the wealth in the world, I’m not entirely sure it would have as much meaning as one might assume.
The one with the wealth would be effectively be unable to obtain greater wealth, power, or influence.
Other this individual being able to command arbitrary amounts of goods and services, the rest would compete for the remaining scraps as we do today.
Ironically, if they want technological innovation and all the fancy toys that result, then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it!
Holding on to all the wealth so that nobody else can get it would be highly detrimental to a capitalistic society.
For some people it's a zero sum game. If you have 99% of it, you won.
> then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it
They can give them drones to aim at - enjoy your serfdom, let the AI tell you how to live your best life, don’t worry and don’t step out of the walled garden
Not much point in serfdom when they don't have use for human labor.
> Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.
Where do these few acquire all their wealth?
What happens when these remaining few need to compete?
In the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land.
Now if we are lucky and the owners are humans with a good heart (and not AI), maybe there is some room for some people (aka provide authentic experiences)
> They will corner finite resources and land.
They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?
Investors don’t usually like to invest in companies that aren’t going to eventually earn any revenue either
Money is a mirage. You can't use dollars to hold land; you need force projection.
Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them.
You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase with no injection of money at all.
We can’t magically skip steps. It’s like South Park’s underwear gnomes. We’re missing steps in between and hand waving them away
The first comment said "They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?"
I was explaining that money is irrelevant and so are the jobless masses. Someone owns the factories, and that person is the one who is relevant here. They of course need to be convinced, by money or other means, but the jobless masses are only relevant to the extent that they own and control wealth; since they are jobless, they probably have very little ownership or control.
You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
> You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
Whoa there internet friend! I don't think I said anything about wealth concentration not being a trend. I'm just talking about AI. I'm still waiting for someone to explain coherent, undeniable watertight reasons that we're on a one-way track that goes from AI companies to infinite money glitch or robot death factories. I've already made my arguments against why I don't think it will happen before[0][1]
Maybe the argument is some already-rich fella with magic robot factories will have everything they will ever need, so they brush away all of humanity like an unsightly bit of dandruff on their shoulder with their kill bot drone army.
I guess if you squint at it long enough, that kinda sounds plausible. In the same way someone could press a giant red nuke button and have us all wiped out like a Terminator movie. But it's making a lot of fantastic assumptions without a lot of concreteness. That is, many people seem to be claiming "this is the AI endgame" rather than seeing other possibilities that aren't so ridiculously cynical or nihilistic with leaky abstractions
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48330434
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966936
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the argument isn't that whoever controls AI will use it to kill everyone, it's that they'll control nearly everything because power snowballs.
They could kill everyone, so aren't you glad they decided to open a soup kitchen instead? Here, have some UBI. Of course, it's not quite "universal" yet, so you'll have to sell your house to make it under the means test. A local firm, owned by a national private equity company, forming part of an international portfolio fund, making up an ETF owned mostly by Anthropic investors, will be happy to buy that bit of real estate. Oh, you wrote that on social media? I'm afraid you're not the kind of tenant we're looking for.
This is basically how life already works for people who aren't capable of holding down a job today. I don't think it's ridiculously cynical or nihilistic to extrapolate from the available data and assume it's going to suck once working people have no bargaining power other than asking politely.
Money isnt real. If you can go to a peice of land and just claim it, and no one can rest it from you, then its your land.
Governments and society is what we make to avoid that sort of anarchy, but if certain entities become more powerful than the these institutions, then they can just take over whatever they want
The abstraction of capital and money get a bit funny when wealth is sufficiently concentrated. If there is a monopsomy (one buyer), then they can largely dictate the price of anything. If they also control violent coercion via a captured state or other means, then they can compel production at that price point.
The idea of capitalism only really makes sense when wealth is reasonably distributed such that there is still reasonable competition in both the marketplace and control of the state.
You mean like the Russian oligarchs that keep 'investing' in the war they are in... oh, you mean where they fall out a window when they don't.
The next thing is the idea of money really does break down once you get automation without people. If you have said automation and enough materials to get going you can start increasing your 'wealth' in things like factories/robots/data where the now unemployed stop having any means to make more money. Hence you'll start buying up properties from people that are going bankrupt.
In any given game, why are there always a few (say 3) top players?
Same reason.
Whatever, let it happen. Humans working on anything other than exactly what they want to do is stupid. The few will eventually have to give the masses the necessities at some point though that can happen in one of two ways, from the very beginning or wrested forcefully after a painful era. Both are better than the current paradigm of what is essentially slavery with extra steps. A world where a human can work exactly on whatever they’re passionate about or not work at all if they don’t want to is the ideal.
Without jobs, and after our savings run out, we will be homeless people. Then, after that, we can try to bargain for ... whatever homeless people get in this society. It doesn't look like much to me.
Call it 'basic income' if that helps.
If I’m one of the six people who ends up with all the money and controlling all the robots, why do I want your 3 bed 2 bath house in Tennessee? Trying to take it from you will only make you riot.
It’s not exactly a bright outlook, but I do think we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
Of course, your average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
You will need electricity, water you will be producing waste etc. in your Tennessee house. Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?
Really I don’t see any playable alternative other than near complete annihilation of human race. It’s very similar to a nuclear apocalypse. Very few get to survive.
>Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?
Ideally governments will see to it. This also assumes that governments have a much larger army of robots than any private individual. Just like how governments makes it illegal to own firearms, it will be illegal to own certain class of robots with combat capability..
Thus governments (the people really/ideally) will see to it that everyone will be comfortable with minimum amount of work utilizing the robots.
One can dream!
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
The government at least has to maintain the appearance.
Realistically though, if there are some humans left, they are going to want to live in a society. Humans are fundamentally social and I think the people in charge would eventually realize this. But then again rich people are not normal, so maybe not
>they are going to want to live in a society.
Now stop and imagine what kind of society the rich people you know and hear of would want to live in?
Do they want a bunch of poors around? Of course not. Do they want to give the money so they are not poor? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said poor people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of dumb people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them education so they are not dumb? Of course not. Would many of them just 'erase' said dumb people. History says yes.
Do they want a bunch of ugly people around? Of course not. Do they want to give them plastic surgery, genetic manipulation so they are not ugly? Of course not. Would many of them 'erase' said ugly people. History says yes.
There are a number of people that already think that the Earths population should be culled back to a few million people. Giving people that believe this power seems to be a really good way to cause a genocide.
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
Bruh. This has nothing to do with like Elon coming and taking the house away. This is just plain old reality.
Without income or savings, people can't afford houses. How would they pay the property taxes? Can't maintain the house. The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes. This happens all the time. Nobody swoops in and saves those people.
Also, hang on. Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
> The house gets repossessed or sold for taxes
Sold to whom? Isn’t the argument that no one will have money? There are approximately as many houses in the US as there are households. We are not going to see all the houses empty and all the households homeless. Maybe the people who are currently buying at a time when home values are historically high will be shafted. But those houses will not end up empty.
> Will we be "not worse" or will our standard of living "fall precipitously"? Those feel different.
Reading comprehension. These are the two relevant statements - speaking of the average:
> we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.
and speaking of HN denizens:
> average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
>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.
How will the people working on exactly what they want to eat?
by force
When someone else is making/distributing all the guns and ammo? Not so easy.
Union robot armies
Oh no a coronal mass ejection has taken out the power grid
I think everyone who is able should earn their keep. From ants to lions, to survive and live, even if in meager spurts they must put in some work.
In all likelihood you will end up more like a Syrian refugee than mr outdoor survivor manly man.
Only if wealth will be evenly distributed, otherwise you're just enriching someone else.
Would you accept "fairly" distributed instead of "evenly"?
I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly? Jobs that require special skills and training, or require taking on more responsibility?
I don't think the problem is that some work earns different amounts of money. To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands, because the people doing the work are not being compensated fairly
"fair" involves a value judgement and requires a moral system. "even" is pure mathematics.
> I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly?
Agreeing with that is easy. Agreeing with which jobs should be compensated more highly is hard. Because everyone has different morality systems.
> To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands
I know people who strongly believe Bezos and other billionaires are being <fairly> compensated for the value they've brought to their customers via their businesses.
Fairness can also be mathematical. Fair chances. No special treatment.
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
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).
I would prefer "evenly" but "fairly" would be better than what we have now. If AI and robots are going to make infinite progress and replace all labor, then I definitely would want "evenly".
What would keep people from circumventing a roboticized society and forming their own human-based society? Buy good and services produced by other people and avoid and or penalize members who cheat -ostracize them. There can be parallel systems. Pretty much only communist systems prevent non-communist systems from operating. In capitalist systems communist systems that form from time to time fail because members grow disillusioned with the inevitable slackers and because they operate within a greater society can't just send slackers to gulags or re-educational camps.
In an hypothetical future where society has completely broken down because of extreme concentration of wealth (and means of production and everything) I can see there not being any possibility for a human-based society. In such a doomsday scenario, regular people wouldn't be able to trade anything because they wouldn't be able to produce anything, because all the land will be taken over by the very few ultrarich. Nowhere to live, nowhere to grow food, etc. Essentially surplus population. No government to protect you either, since it will have been coopted by the ultrarich (essentially, them becoming the government). Enforcement could be done by robots, and robots do not revolt or go on strike, nor will they question orders. Maintenance can be done by other robots, harvesting, even health care for the ultrarich.
So how (in this admittedly doomsday scenario that I hope won't come to pass) will a human-based society be able function?
Unless expropriation happens the rich can’t simply take over land. They still have to buy it. Ted Turner, Bill Gates still had to buy land from individuals. So unless people sell all their land to these people, there will still be land.
First, let me clarify my dystopian scenario is extreme. I'm aware of this, and I'm not saying it will necessarily come to pass.
(edit: removed a wall of text that was repeating my previous comment).
What I describe can start gradually, like arguably it may be already happening, and pick up speed after a certain tipping point. After enough automation + concentration of power and wealth has been achieved, then the masks can fall off.
And then...
> Unless expropriation happens
Exactly. If you're completely amoral and powerful, you only buy or ask for permission if the other side has something to bargain with (such as labor or violent revolt). If they don't anymore, and you have all the force in the world, why not simply take whatever you want?
In the USSR, Cuba, China, etc., where expropriation or nationalization happened, first they confiscated everyone’s firearms. That’s always step one to take rights or property from people.
I know the 2A is both contentious and leads to problems (like violence), but it also gives pause and prevents overzealous or corrupt governments or individuals from going too far. Yes there was ruby ridge and Waco and Kent state and others but still the government has to think hard before it goes further encroaching on liberties. All those examples are tragedies; however in a society with oppression not only would that be routine but they’d be hidden or accepted as fate of counter revolutionaries.
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.
Well yes, that how it has always been. But if robots do the labor we don’t have to abide by that nonsense anymore. It’s a paradigm shift.
I realize we’re probably not going to see it in our lifetimes but that will be the norm in the future.
Also that extremely ingrained mindset of earning your keep is exactly what keeps most of the world working hard while the elite jetset and live a life of pleasure.
More than a mindset, it also takes quite a bit of money to live in a permanent vacation 24/7, even modestly.
Aside from the income, employment also has a way of occupying one’s time. Without that, one would often spend additional funds on various forms of entertainment (books, movies, crafts, travel, etc.)…
I disagree. I think certain art and creative pursuits will always garner a premium when it’s human made, no matter how good something computer generated is. Just look at the game of chess. No one watches two computers playing each other even though they’re better than any human in the world. People watch other people play. There are lots of avenues like that where people will only watch other people do things, or only purchase things made by other people, even if they are lower quality.
I’m also envisioning an age of abundance. It’s not just your basic necessities of life met. If you have essentially free, electricity and all labor done by robots, that’s not an impossible thing to foresee.
I also think for a large group of people child rearing will take up a huge chunk of their time with many more children being born now that all of the unenviable parts of raising a child can be outsourced to robots.
Honestly, yes, it does sound like fantastical utopian thinking, but I don’t think you have to make that many leaps to get there.
Without direction or a pull in life people tend to self-destruct. Even the wealthy are susceptible to this. Hollywood nepotites are a nice example: they live off their parents's wealth or easily acquired money and self-destroy themselves. They are not engaging in higher pursuits but rather basic degeneration. Not all of course; some do good, productive things.
It's easy to point to high profile nepotites but I've known plenty of folks from all classes who have self-destructed. It's hardly limited to those with lives of leisure.
Many people will I think but not most. Also, since we’re talking about fantastical things, you could have lots of things to mitigate this. If someone has a pattern of self-destructive behavior, you could essentially have two robots follow them around everywhere as a more effective ankle bracelet. And they’re specifically tasked with keeping you from trouble and stopping you from ruining your life. Maybe that can replace prisons.
Not really - books and movies at the library are free and those who cultivate interests will find no trouble filling up the day.
Better ban social media and algorithmic feeds as well as betting/gaming and electronic games.
I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in 100+ miles with EM noise. And that is assuming their isn't any larger organized resistance organizations.
EMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off.
The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide.
Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.
I mean explosively pumped generators aren't new and were invented in the 50s. The hardest part is getting a fast enough explosive, however it doesn't take that much effort or chemistry knowledge to make supersonic explosives if someone needed it. And neodynium magnets are pretty common consumer products these day.
It is harder that just blowing stuff up, but when one side is using killer robots and other advanced electronics tech it doesn't seem like much effort in comparison. We already see criminal elements making guns and drugs and narco submarines, a fast explosive and magnets doesn't seem beyond reach to me.
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
> I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans.
It's a supreme delusion that it can't. Military tech isn't in the 19th century anymore.
What are robots and turrets going to do that humans couldn't do in their place even better? Humans have yet to invent a wall that can't be broken.
No. There is this fantasy that AI will take over and be our nanny, doling out the perfect communist bread, this time without having to wait in line!
Fortunately, that is nonsense for many reasons, but 3 important ones are: the nature of AI, the nature of humans, evolutionary biology and the international cooperation required to optimize the sharing of resources without humane stakeholders making the decisions.
So, sorry if you're of the Marxist, post-scarcity ultimate equality persuasion. It just so happens that you'll never get the entire world to want to become an amorphous gelatinous blob where all the infrastructural, interpersonal, resource distribution and many other decisions are all handled by robots so you never need to learn or do anything about how it all works.
People may be excluded from the main capital/robot/AI economy, but they still need to eat, shelter themselves, and trade with one another. That produces an economy, even if it is informal or black-market.
So basically rich people trade amongst themselves while the masses live in squalor? That sounds as either a concept for cyberpunk book or a revolution.
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?
- 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".
- 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
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.
> 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
For the remaining rulers sharing their slice of the world – once the working class has been replaced by robots – land, food and resources are they key ingredients for the post-capitalist economy.
They can fly in planes built by their robots, in airports controlled by their robots, their luggage carried, their limo to the yacht, the captain, the haute cuisine, (the escort service?), everything can be done by robots off the coast of Monaco.
So for those lucky thousands that will own the world, there will be a few entertainers made of flesh, but also a few fellow rulers that will want to wipe them out to control their share of resources as theirs dwindle. So wars will never end, until the last one.
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.
Kinda ironic that the blog article about a "peopleless economy" is gated behind a "prove you're human" CAPTCHA from Cloudflare.
The idea that the economy is based on "consumption" depends on how you define "consumption".
If you think of "consumption" as "buying real world products from Wal Mart or Amazon" then that is wrong, the US economy is not really based on that.
Most GDP in the US comes from the service sector. And one thing is true about human nature - a lot of people like having other people serve them.
There are many things that machines can do for us but we still pay people to do them for us. For example, machines in a food plant can cook pasta and pack that pasta into a frozen dinner that you could eat at home. But people still like going out for a pasta dinner
So even if AI is going to replace a whole lot of jobs, you would still have some people paying others to serve them just because people like having other people serve them.
but would the scale stay the same?
Take a hotel for example - it's nice to have a butler, someone at the front desk, and a waiter, perhaps. But you don't need the cleaning crew, the kitchen staff, etc, that run behind the scenes. These you could replace with robots, no problem.
See https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/page/n7/m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune%3A_The_Butlerian_Jihad
Human civilization? In this 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.
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.
See also https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory which was thoroughly discussed 17 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712 (1426 comments).
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.
We already see this happening.
As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down.
The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy.
This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune.
Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No.
There
This whole post rests on a basic misunderstanding of economics.
Which is?
GDP = C + I + G + Xn = W + I + R + P
(To grossly simplify the single-nation macroeconomic picture, at least)
C = consumption I = investment (the first one) G = government Xn = net exports
W = wages paid to labor I = interest on capital R = rent on resources and real property P = profit to entrepreneurs
consumption ~= wages, so if wages go to zero, the economy massively shrinks unless government steps in with something like taxation to fund UBI, sovereign wealth fund distributions, or direct universal ownership.
Wages could go up, it's just in the form of trillionare paying another trillionare a trillion dollars a day. GDP would be looking rosy!
This is kinda what’s been happening for a while -
Wages are decoupled from consumption, and it is increasingly aggregated in the higher income brackets.
This is the ‘K’ economy.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...
Sure, what you describe is usually in the Macro textbooks. However in XXI century USA, Consumption has been detached from ‘wages’ for a while now (“since the 1970s”, ie 2 generations, per https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/)
In reality, the top income brackets are propping up Consumption numbers. This is part of what have become to understand as the ‘K’ shaped economy, together with the speeding up of capital accumulation/concentration.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...
Edits for clarity
ctrl+f rentier: 0 hits
ya...
found the economist (just kidding)
This article is exactly as annoying as politicians who ascribe everything to the Economy.
Suppose we modeled this as two separate countries:
* AI Island: just runs AI in data centers.
* Elsewhere: same as now.
Wouldn't there be gains from trade?
Sure, AI Island might be able to provide lots of cheap Internet services, but you can't eat Internet. Wouldn't they want something in exchange?
And wouldn't there still be lots of jobs in Elsewhere that can't be done over the Internet and have nothing to do with AI Island? If AI Island charges too much, they can always trade among themselves.
I think this mentions that AI Island also has robots than can produce most goods
I don't see why we should take that scenario seriously.
In part because agriculture is already heavily mechanized and many factories already have lots of robots. How much would access to an LLM improve the robots?
Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip.
What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.
That's getting way ahead of ourselves considering that currently, AI can't even be trusted to run a vending machine.
Also, if that's such a great deal, why not invest in someone else's company that runs a farm?
Let's say we have two companies, one which has a human manager (and maybe uses AI for research) and one that just has AI. Is the AI really going to do better?
The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.
As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.
It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.
Yes, that makes more sense. AI is the continuation of automation. I don’t think it’s going to eliminate management entirely, but you can certainly get to the point where the owner is basically just an investor and they hire a professional management firm.
This happens a lot in real estate. The work is all contracted out.
good enough LLMs aren't genies lol
Except very few people will actually be able to buy beetroot or anything else because there won't be any jobs. The wealth is all concentrating at the top into very few hands.
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.
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.
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?
Imagine if the top 0.001% build and jointly own an ASI that makes human labor completely obsolete in every single way. This seems like the worst case scenario for the rest of us, right? Wrong. In this scenario, these 0.001% would not interact with the rest of us in any way. They will not hire us, they will not buy anything from us, and they will not sell anything to us either. After all, the rest of us are completely obsolete to them, so what benefit could they possibly have in interacting with us? They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
At that point, from the perspective of the rest of us, they simply don't exist. And their ASI wouldn't exist either. We would get back to the world as it was pre-ASI. One where all of us need stuff that others among us can offer, and we hire one another and buy stuff from one another. Sure, things aren't as great as they could have been. But the status quo isn't the worst thing in the world either.
The scenario that is a lot more concerning/weird is the more realistic one, where ASI makes 99% of human labor obsolete - but not the remaining 1%. At that point, the ASI owners will hold American-idol style auditions where thousands of hopefuls vie for the opportunity to be in that lucky 1%. Auditions where we beg and plead shamelessly to be chosen by the ASI owners. Auditions where the losers are left to scrounge for the 2nd hand, 3rd hand, and 4th hand scraps, that trickle down from the 1%.
I hope to god that when an ASI is built, and in the unlikely case that it doesn't simply overthrow humanity, that we will have a political structure in place that gives everyone a meaningful share in the fruits of ASI. Or that the owners of this ASI consider every other human to be utterly useless, f off to their Randian paradise, and leave the rest of us completely alone. The middle ground between these two is where dystopia lives
I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% less interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply. "Humans will be so rich they will fuck off to other parts of the world and leave gorilla habitat alone" hasn't really panned out so well.
Unless this ASI either way, turns the world into an opencast mine and burns off the atmosphere on the way out..
>They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.
See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.
Their servers need energy, their bots need materials, these things come from real ownership of land. There are also things said rich people like, such as beautiful locations. And all of these beautiful locations are filled with ugly stinky people that are more poor than them. At least some of these rich people will want to 'deal' with this problem.
Pointless economy? Technically Possible!
"Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them."
----------------
This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.
To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.
Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1].
tl;dr: The most likely scenario is that AI affects us at the scale of the internet. Revolutionary, but nothing that fundamentally gets rid of labor economics (like this article posits).
[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
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.
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.
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).
This author's writing style is too obnoxious for me to have gotten all the way through it, but the important thing is that he's wrong.
Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included.
Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is bridged by hopeful investors and creditors.
The present AI buildout is an example of this. And it is not immune from the principle. There will ultimately need to be real people generating real demand somewhere in the economy in order to justify an economic return on the massive outlay.
Government expenditures are also included. Tax dollars used to pay for things are ultimately satisfying demand generated by citizens. Even, believe it or not, a deranged government blowing up random people in the Middle East. That still traces to the (perceived) security needs of some population.
The aggregate demand equation is as follows:
AD = C + I + G + NX
C = Consumer Spending I = Investment G = Government Spending NX = Net Exports
What's going to happen in the future is that demand will have to shift in this equation. Remember that Investment needs to be justified by some demand created elsewhere — it is in essence the purchase of an IOU predicated on future demand that must ultimately trace down to real people. We are all broadly in agreement that Consumption will contract, as labor is progressively disempowered and capital continues to concentrate. Let's ignore NX.
The answer is that the sources of demand in the future will likely shift to, primarily, (1) demand still generated by wealthy people consuming things (e.g. mansions, yachts, rockets, ego-affirming Mars colonies) and (2) government spending that serves entire populations.
This all assumes, of course, that we continue with the present economic model, in spite of the immense human suffering and turmoil that is likely on the horizon, as we transition into a fundamentally different technological age.
we do not trade with animals, for they have nothing to offer.
AIs will not trade with us, for we have nothing to offer.
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.
AIs are not conscious and do not have real needs that are detached from a real person. That can certainly be simulated, but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.
Science fiction has melted people's minds.
?but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.
Buwahaha. Jesus Christ, people won't unplug them, half the bastards here would marry them... then defend their AI girlfriend to the death.
No my friend, we won't just unplug the data centers.
We would not be able to agree on that. Already today, some of the people who would actually be able to unplug some of them (Anthropic) are worrying about "model welfare". I think you are not putting together how much of an anti-human death cult this is.
Data centers are incredibly dense and exposed military targets. This may become relevant in the future.
They are not self replicating yet…
There's a lot of bad economics and assumptions here even if the conclusion is plausible.
Yes, an economy of robots harvesting things to serve a few masters (or they takeover themselves Terminator-style) is possible and perhaps the end game.
Pitchforks
Paperclip maximizer
Man, I really freaking hate cloudflare bot checks. I can't even access this site, which I presume is just a few kilobytes of simple static HTML with some straightforward text content. I shouldn't have to work this hard to prove I'm human, it's exhausting
https://imgur.com/a/peopleless-economy-terrifyingly-enough-n...
https://pastebox.io/paste/ZtZHQETZcjdh
https://pastes.io/OZqRw8jT
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.
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.
> The Economy is not only an abstract concept, but a very twisted and perverse one as well. It once used to refer to the well-being of the masses
When?
> We already have more empty houses than homeless people, more food than we eat, and more medicine than we use, yet people die starving or untreated anyway.
10x more people die of car crashes than famine globally. And about the same die from tobacco exposure than malnutrition which is a wider net to cast.
If we just focus on advanced economies basically nobody dies of famine and less people die of malnutrition than car crashes by a long margin.
A lot of this article is just vibes, not data.
Exactly. The author is a clueless idiot.
"If agi and perfect humanoid robot slaves, then xyz". That's a motherfucking big "if".
More of a "when" nowadays.
> 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.
“ 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
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?
It’s not about stopping progress, rather stopping the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful over our lives. Whether we can use claude to automate a fucking script or service is meaningless compared to that.
The dream of elon musk et al is to keep accumulating power and have non-humans serve them. They don’t want us, and as soon as they can they will replace us. But here we are giving them more power. Ridiculous
> But here we are giving them more power.
Sure, but those of us who need to earn income are in a prisoner's dilemma with billions of actors and realistically we'll never coordinate that boycott.
On the other hand, the OP article ignores the fact that while the economy might not need us, if/when enough people's actual material life conditions degrade beyond a certain point, there will be an old fashioned bloody revolution.
So the real practical question ends up being how good the ultra rich can make their AI defense bots before that happens.
I don't think ultra weathy are a bad thing if their results move society foward. As of right now it's very obvious they are mostly aligned mostly because how technology functions.
Easily agree regulation or different actions can be done to improve aspects but the raw progress is undeniable. I think our current regulation space is doing a decent job without killing ecobomic progress.
I see no other economic system driving as effeciently as heavily rewarding greed. You can't create the future by commitee.
California is a great model here. Maga hate it because of liberal policies, liberals hate it because the insane economic wealth generation. But if california attacks their wealthy and the engine that drives that watch it completely collapse the system.
If you hate the california model and the no regulation/tax republican model of US then I hard disagree. China roughly operates in the no regulation model and pulled 850M people out of poverty with a stupid weath divide and hyper elite but they are overall FAR better off now because of that greed alignment.
EU is another alternative and they are slowly moving to the edge of collapse. Mass tax/regulation AND no wealth generation.
Choose your poison but there's really no other magical alternative here.
Damn downvoted to oblivion 3 minutes after you posted this. The bots are out in force on this one.
If nobody is being paid, who is buying, and what defines the price and elasticity?
I mean this has a lot of "Pooh! that's not honey, thats SOCIALISM" in it
Once the owning class owns mostly everything and* has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them. It barely has real consequences for them already -as they have consistently ended up richer after the dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the covid recession.*
The coming out richer part is undeniably true, but I have doubts about the conclusion, which is something like "after oligarchs own everything, they don't need many people". Look, even the old Bell System required participation of about a third of the US population.
Oligarchs might be able to have young, fit concubines, and loyal, retainers with steel thews if there's a population of less than a third of today, but they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists. Telegram communications might be possible, but who's going to maintain gigawatts of data centers for such a population? I'm pretty sure "AI" will slip away in such a world, but who needs waifus when real harems can exist?
> they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists
They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.
LLM AI won't give them a cancer cure, guaranteed.
They believe it will, which is why they are acting the way they are.
The top LLM "AI" models were put in a simulated economy, and it showed the most successful models ended up destroying the productivity of the fiscal ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUekLTqV1ME
"If not [cult], why [cult] shaped?" lol =3
I've seen this idea float around r/singularity and r/collapse for years and it's probably responsible for a horrifying amount of suicides at this point.
It's not even that good of an argument. It makes some incredibly flimsy assumptions; reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history, ultra-compliant superintelligences, a perfectly unitary elite without any desire to defect, all other societal variables staying the same somehow, etc.. It only exists because of upvote algorithms amplifying emotional action-suppressing doomer content. Really not that different from other hostile memes like QAnon.
I would really like if people stopped spreading this anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy. It's something I have to give Luke Drago some points for, he actually cares about the problem rather than just saying the inevitable eternal stratification hypersuffering anti-singularity is inevitable and implying that death is preferable.
All workable policy paths involve taxing capital and you're gonna call that Marxist even though it isn't, so we're at an impasse.
Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.
Yep, exactly. The USA is in the fortunate position of having a solid historical example of how to re-balance an economy that let inequality cook out of control: FDR. We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again -- but at the moment I'm afraid our aim is drifting to the right, a right that calls its own policy position from 6 months prior "radical Marxist lunacy" and will certainly do the same to any compromise struck in that historically informed center.
> We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again...
I would much rather not have a repeat of the president who ran the federal government like he was a king, and the Constitution a bare semblance of a suggestion. FDR was one of the worst presidents in history, and many of the problems we face in our country today can be traced back to his immense executive branch power grab.
Wonder how many read that first sentence thinking it was referring to the current times… (;->
Yeah, the Republicans are very keen on the unitary executive, it's time for the Democrats to get their mojo back.
>reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history
Not that I agree with all of Marx's ideas, but I think this is one of his less controversial ideas. There has always been a class struggle between business owners and workers, and there probably always will be.
>anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy
An increasing amount of US citizens have little to no trust in our government to actually come up with a viable solution that helps the people in a world where AI automation is happening across multiple sectors at once.
You want to address the paranoia people feel? You have to also address that lack of trust in our government. That's a tall order.
It isn't inevitable but it is where we are heading. We are basically in the early 1930s. Even fighting against it and winning is going to be extremely ugly. And that is the most optimistic scenario.
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.
Some of the points you are making are great. I would however argue that a small group of people trading is still an economy albeit a shrunk one. But what I believe the point the author is making is the following : consumption based economy isn't required to an economy. In some aspect, I believe that it is false : we are *required* to have a bunch of strictly unnecessary stuff to survival (cellphones and data plans being one example) to be considered as a functionnal human being (pretty much everywhere in the planet at that). I also believe that he points out something that is true however : most people have been unable to partake in consumption society (see Lewis' 1954 article on unlimited supply of labor) for a long time. This, and chronic unemployement that appeared in the 70's, showed that a 2 speed economy is possible, even preferable for the capitalists ; and what was limited to the global south at Lewis' time (though some more recent historical work tend to disagree) is happening in the North. My conclusion would be that the acceleration of inequalities to the point of "uneconomicness" of a large part of the population is what the author points out to be a "peopleless economy". I personnaly found the article to be stimulating, even with its many shortcuts. What I make of your points are less a contradiction but a optimistic point of view of the situation : secession of the capitalists mean freedom for the rest. But empirical observation show that ressources being limited (although standalone freedom being unacceptable as well for them), auto-organization is confronted with the armed forces mentionned in the article.
Also, enterprises trading capital endlessly isn't exactly what is happening with the ai (alledged) bubble ?
Economy is not zero sum game [1]. The fact that someone has more, doesn't mean everyone else is worse off because of it. Many hungry african kids can look upon the people from first world and ponder the same question. "How will the rich people that have everything survive now, that with AI they will have even more" except from their perspective, we are the elon musks in their eyes.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchange-not-zero-sum-game
A poor example considering Musk is responsible for a substantial increase in hunger in Africa recently.
Giving away things is not mandatory. If a homeless man is dependent on you to leave money for him and you stop one day it's not your fault he has a tough time.
In the same sense Africa is far better off now than it has ever been because of advances in the west.
Probally the same for humans and hyper future AI. We will not have the recources they do but will naturally have 100x better lives because of them even though it will be deeply unequal.
I'm not here to defend Elon Musk, but what is the context of this?
Attacking and dismantling various USAID programs during his DOGE stint.
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.