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Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

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Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#171

Post by jagged-chisel »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #70
Aurornis wrote: post #36

> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than d…

> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries. And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.

“Figure out”? Pretty sure it’s a solved problem. It’s only social and psychological issues standing in the way. I suppose that’s what you meant.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#172

Post by selectodude »

malfist wrote: post #149
thinkingkong wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living. We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres…

Something that drove this home to me is that there is more vacant housing than there are unhoused people in the US. We could solve homelessness tomorrow, but we'd rather confiscate their camping equipment and throw them in prison than help. And I'm sure someone will be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am and what about mental illness and drug use. As if those people don't deserve our compassion too.

Are you going to be the one to round up all the homeless people and ship them off to abandoned houses in Appalachia?

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#173

Post by hnav »

talkingtab wrote: post #160

We have an economy like this: producer => provider => consumer. What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers? 1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00 This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and w…

it's stunning to me that in most verticals the middlemen seem to be eating the whole pie.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#174

Post by [deleted] »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #105
ihumanable wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CGP Grey has an older video now about what happened to horses over time. For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist. We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys…

At the risk of invoking “but this time it’s different”, AI hasn’t produced a new job sector. A farrier who can’t make a living off of horseshoes could at least go work at the Ford assembly plant. In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.

[deleted]

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#175

Post by EGreg »

I'm going to say something that triggers people on HN (because it involves creating our own currencies, like berkshares, bristol pounds, etc.)

Here goes. Our towns and cities need to create our own money supply, especially to survive the coming depression (Both Keynes and Hayek would agree). The vast majority of our money is currently issued by banks, which have exactly the opposite incentives, they will issue less credit and on worse terms the more you need it. In fact the banks love to lend to the ultra-rich (including the guys who pay $0 in taxes and use their shares as collateral, while having their corporations buy back the stocks).

If you want to tinker around the edges, keep using their money. But in a world where AI makes everything cheap, why not have communities roll out their own money, and pay UBI in it? Waiting for the federal government to issue UBI is a fool's errand (not even Nixon was able to get it done, as president, much less someone like Andrew Yang who I supported and built campaign apps for, http://yang2020.app).

The community acts as the source and the sink of the money. And since we don't want to "trust" any given member of the community to operate the database, we need... a blockchain. I know, this is where I will get heavily downvoted for mentioning that (I have a feeling that there is even keyword matching to do it automatically). But... what is the alternative?

https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...

The alternative is that people keep relying on giant corporations to give us jobs, and on giant banks to issue our money supply, while they just siphon more and more money to the rich. But any time someone says "hey, we have the technology to self-organize and serve each other" there are people frothing at the mouth angry at this person. Frankly, towns could build socialist cooperatives for everything, e.g. their own Uber without the shareholder class taking most drivers' salaries. AI makes it easy. But the main thing is making our own money supply, and giving it out as UBI to each citizen to spend on food, robots, etc.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#177

Post by yegle »

talkingtab wrote: post #160

We have an economy like this: producer => provider => consumer. What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers? 1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00 This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and w…

In your example, why didn't a 6000% ROI not attract enough investors and introduce competitions, eventually lower the ROI?

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#178

Post by luke5441 »

tombert wrote: post #133
krupan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you getting paid to do any of these? Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive? Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed

I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases. My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope. I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never…

Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research.

To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#180

Post by ryeights »

tombert wrote: post #143
ryeights wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynical conclusion of AGI is that most humans will be enslaved or disposed of. We won't be forced to continue working for pay despite being slower, less intelligent, and more expensive than machines.

Are people really basing their world view off The Terminator? Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.

You saw something kinda analogous in a movie once, therefore it's impossible? Am I the one basing my views off of science fiction?
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