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The dead economy theory

owenmcgrann.com

201–210 of 1001 posts

Re: The dead economy theory

#201

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money we can do…

This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it.

Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.

Re: The dead economy theory

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it need to? 99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't. Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing... Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing... We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and…

But your last sentence is talking about something completely different: the current reality, which most of the tech CEOs and AI boosters refuse to engage with. For those of us in the fact-based world, the idea that AI will replace most human jobs is still just a talking point. It's a future possibility (not a future certainty). But it's enough of a possibility that we need to be talking about it , and not just airily…

> many died penniless.

99% of people died penniless in those times...

Re: The dead economy theory

#203
The fact that this could happen is widely known and has been talked about for years now. What to do about it is the real issue. I've seen David Shapiro and many others tangentially talk about UBI and similar "post AI economics". The dream was that the machines could do the housework whilst we all painted, wrote music and built beautiful wood furniture in our sheds. It still could be that way, but we need to sort out responsible sharing of resources first, and humanity has never been able to do that. We actively try to earn as much as we can, for the very reason of getting access to the resources that others don't. So often now, it only results in standing still or sliding backwards. I feel like 20 or 30 years ago, the average person seemed to have more disposable income.

Re: The dead economy theory

#204

> The people writing the checks are not in the habit of lighting trillions of dollars on fire for a better autocomplete and an endless proliferation of longer and longer memos that nobody reads. Aren’t they though? What about that whole crypto thing.

These are people who spend billions on whatever this decade's hype cycle is.

Re: The dead economy theory

#205

>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you…

Business to business I guess. But there will be collapse for sure of industries that serve the consumer directly, such as agriculture. Meanwhile industries that power and arm the state will be expanded: military drone production to secure compute sites from the human savages, rare earth mining to support technological expansion, rerouting of water resources from public drinking and agricultural irrigation purposes to industry and manufacturing supporting the seats of power, power generation.

Re: The dead economy theory

#206
Absolutely slamming that upvote arrow. Someone finally put into an in-depth, well-read essay what I've been trying to argue on my blog, in HN comments, in-person for several years now. What they call the "Dead Economy Theory" I've taken to calling the "Anti-Human Economy", but it's basically the same thing: half-assed, milquetoast automations displacing human labor such that capital can continue to accrue upwards and with no consideration for the actual impacts of these changes on humans, society, community, or civilization itself.

I'm far from the first to highlight it either. The Animatrix highlighted it beautifully what one can expect in a civilization where machines replace human labor in a general sense, and where systems haven't been built to preserve human interests prior to their rollout - tax schemes, job programs, collaboration rather than competition. Ghost in the Shell has had multiple story arcs about the consequences of displacing human labor without care for the consequences of said displacement, because the displacing party gets all the money and power while remaining unaccountable (or so they believe until the very end) for their actions. Cyberpunk dystopias have been intensely focused on it in video games for decades: System Shock, Deus Ex, Horizon, you name it. All of them take those next steps of "what happens when automation displaces a plurality of labor" and reached the same conclusions on strife, despair, poverty, and the general collapse of social order.

These effects have been known for centuries. They are not new concepts.

The folks trotting out "people say this about every technological revolution" are those willfully naive to the past historical harms and ignorant of the plight of others in the present. A flimsy excuse to avoid having to stare into the heart of the system and understand its machinations for yourself, to avoid having to accept that yes, you are a part of it too, and therefore bear some degree of blame for how things function. This isn't the loom, or the radio, or the computer coming onto the scene, but generalized intelligence partnered with generalized robotics to replace the entire sum of human labor. This is what the AI firms openly and repeatedly advertise. This is what CEBros continue to do layoffs for, never considering for a single moment what comes after. Excuses of "people need to find meaning outside of work" or "new jobs will be created anyway" are similarly ignorant in narrative, hollow excuses to avoid the most basic of rational thoughts about the system they're defending beyond whatever nugget of faux-intellectualism they can spout out to sound like they have a clue.

General intelligence, with general robotics, to replace general labor.

There is exactly one way that story ends, and it's not for the benefit of humanity, not under the current systems of governance and systemic incentives we've built for ourselves. It doesn't end with infinite leisure or transhumanism or grandiose visions of utopia, but with the wholesale destruction of human civilization in the name of personal power and wealth.

Re: The dead economy theory

#207

I feel like people have said that about every technical revolution. I dont think this article would have been out of place in the hay day of the industrial revolution. Its never been true in the past. Otoh, there always has to be a first time for everything. I think to be convincing though it needs more evidence on how this differed from other technical revolutions.

Every technological revolution spreads more rapidly than the last, so it's novel almost by definition. The internet gradual expanded over 2-3 decades, long enough to give most people, and the economy, the chance to keep up. This is happening far more rapidly.

Re: The dead economy theory

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure people like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg don't really have any ideology beyond "what will make me more money".

It’s telling you left out the people running the biggest AI companies.

Maybe I'm out of the loop. Did Altman and Amodei champion mass immigration and outsourcing industrial production to China?

Re: The dead economy theory

#209

I feel like people have said that about every technical revolution. I dont think this article would have been out of place in the hay day of the industrial revolution. Its never been true in the past. Otoh, there always has to be a first time for everything. I think to be convincing though it needs more evidence on how this differed from other technical revolutions.

As the article mentions, even if it is like other technical revolutions, it could still mean multiple generations of hardship. The economic pain of job displacement in the industrial revolution took 70 years to overcome.

Re: The dead economy theory

#210
This part specifically is a clear indication of a tendency to slide towards corporatism, in Mussolini’s sense.:

> that this leads to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.” The regulator and the regulated have converged into a single interest.

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