Not worried about AI taking our jobs; worried it won't take our current jobs

We've built our social systems around capturing value. You don't necessarily need to do anything useful, it's good enough if you can be the middleman and milk other businesses. For example, you can run an app store and charge 30% fees. Or when there are affordable GPUs, you could quickly buy more than you need to sell them at a higher mark-up later. Or how about letting people write for and moderate on your platform for free, but you own and sell all the resulting content ... Or how about lobbying to make it illegal for mere humans to run strong AI models, so that you get to own all that AI productivity. Bonus points if you pull off the gaslighting and go with "Open AI" as company name for your locked-door shenanigans.

I expect that as soon as AI starts to autonomously create value, there'll be a corporate race to capture that value. And then all the other humans won't gain any free time to do their thinking, creating, or living.

100% agree. Workflow automation is the easy part...a system that leads to fair value distribution is a whole other issue.

Totally hear you. Reinvesting saved time in higher-value / more interesting work doesn’t remove the structural-equity risk, which arguably might be the most challenging problem to solve.

You don't seem to understand the how and why society works the way it does, and as a result you believe in some pretty blatantly false things about AI in general.

Human organization that we see today occurs because of the exchange of economic activity. Some people have time they trade for in exchange for a store of value they can use to purchase things the need. Others pay people to produce things and then sell things they need. This is a distributed economy. It runs in a circle, with money traveling from producer to labor to producer (through consumer), etc in a giant circle.

The value of money is in the properties of money, part of that is partially based on what you can spend that money on (medium of exchange). The value of something is different between people, and even between the utility between other comparable alternatives (marginal utility), it is subjective.

Now if your time value that you can exchange for money goes to zero what happens? You don't exchange your time for free.

There is no demand for time value, no work can be exchanged for value and indirectly later for food, no production can occur because the store of value has been degraded and lost as the medium of exchange fails. You might start off being ok, but then failing since cost on the producer side is payed out first, and shortfalls in profit of projection to actuals will determine if they shut down for legitimate business.

Under AI, a producer can still produce, but no one will have the money to buy their goods after money sieves out of the hands of consumers. You have dynamics where the producer can't sell, and as money becomes more scarce and less liquid the value deflates until its worthless. This is called deflation.

If you print enough money, you might avoid deflation, but the purchasing power also fails being debased, there is no information in prices anymore and so distortions start occurring in the price of things. This leads to shortages in critical goods needed for survival, because demand can't be determined through economic calculation. You also have producers artificially constraining supply to raise price level. This leads to chaotic whipsaws in price with the chaos growing until a point is hit money loses its properties and then deflation occurs again.

The only indicators available to guide action are lagging indicators, forming the impossibility of this hysteresis problem. By the time you know you have a problem, there is no effective action that can be taken to correct course. You need the impossibility of future sight to solve this type of problem, and this occurs in any fiat based system given sufficient time. Legitimate producers leave the market when there is no profit, remaining producers are fueled by money printing, and you have a collapse to non-market socialism which then leads to these problems (despite there seemingly being a market, just not a functioning one).

There are two fundamental guidelines that must be met to stay on the safe path. Producers must make a profit in terms of purchasing power, and Factor markets must make sufficient compensation that they can support themselves, a wife, and three children, also in purchasing power.

Both have largely failed as a trend, and will fail in objective measure by 2030-2033, if not sooner. AI eliminates demand in the factor markets.

When you have so many people alive, who can do nothing in exchange for food, and no one willing to give them food, these people are left to die, and they won't go quietly. Order fails, supply chains fail, and the production flows needed to support that many people break down.

Malthusian reversion in ecological overshoot, which accounts for Catton's observations, will mean the planet might not support 2bn people in total after this happens. There are 8.2bn people alive today.

While AI works mindlessly as a slave, the difference in those numbers will be free to be starving humans, desperate humans with weapons that may eventually end up dying, or following a brass verdict.

When you fail to have a working plan for survival based in reality, the alternative is death, and the loss of rationality of so many people today is a sign that favors death and violence over alternatives. Failing to act to stop destructive dynamics is the same thing as supporting the outcomes when existence is on the line.

We do not live in a world of surplus, we live in a world of scarcity, and some people have complacently been raised as summer children; unaware and unprepared for the coming winter.

If you have competition, you will not have more than your marginal contribution.

If you are free to be human because the tools are working, your marginal contribution will be small, since one guy who accepts not being human could supervise the tools.