721–730 of 1001 posts
If I belong to the group who only own the bottom 10 percent of the wealth, what do I have to loose? Let others become poor too like me and that will force society to find better way to redistribute wealth. Just fyi: I am not poor but thinking the above from a poor person's perspective.
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…
There's a limit to how much elites can consume. Most people are happy with a few million dollars or something. The people who go past that are obsessed; they're competing with each other.
There is no reason for elites to secede. There is no reason why we can't have bajillionaires and subsistence farmers on the same planet, in the same economy, using the same dollars. (It's basically already happened. What's a few more zeroes?) If AI cannot provide security (either directly or through creating wealth used to buy security) then it will not create this level of inequality in the first place.
Places like Sudan have already been left behind and they're currently in the middle of a very bloody war which the West is largely ignoring. Now the Western middle class is making noises about violence because their prosperity is under threat. But this is what capitalism has always done. This is what we signed up for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out? Has X-Twitter released a single new feature since?
no, but they weren’t exactly churning out new features in the 2010s either
This article puts into words a lot of things that had been on my mind as missing in AI discourse. Most significantly, actually considering the _systemic consequences_ of the promised AI future, how it interacts with political economy, an actual critical look (instead of accepting the "Western meta-narrative of modernity" at face value). And maybe more importantly, it articulates really clearly how damaging the restru…
What policies to propose?
>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…
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are ma…
Lets take this to the extreme: only 2 people remain with capital and AI all the rest are replaced.
Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant.
But here is an even more interesting question: As their AI can create anything why would they pay each other? So why do they need money?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are ma…
How many of these top 10% of households will have their breadwinners be replaced with AI? The LLM boom is aimed at them, professionals, knowledge workers, not at landscapers and plumbers.
> How many of these top 10% of households will have their breadwinners be replaced with AI? The LLM boom is aimed at them, professionals, knowledge workers, not at landscapers and plumbers.
The point of AI is to make inequality even more extreme. A well-off worker is still a worker, and it's the dream of every capitalist to not have to pay any of them a dime.
For supposedly smart people, software engineers are really dumb. We should have unionized a decade ago, at the height of our power. Instead too many of us inhaled libertarian propaganda and identified with our bosses instead of our own class.
Most people assume that "the economy" can only ever be based on human consumption, and therefore humans have to have an income in order for "the economy" to exist. This assumption is erroneous; billions of monetary transactions are done every day by companies with no product, no service, and no employees. These are economically valid, even though barely any humans consume or produce anything. The owning class just manages to convert those virtual transactions to "actual" money, and buy products and services because we already produce more than we consume.
It is more than frightening, but "the economy" (whatever that is nowadays) can run without many humans in the loop. AI consuming AI, phantom companies doing transactions with other phantom companies, machines working for machines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are ma…
I keep reading this idea and I think something is missing. Lets take this to the extreme: only 2 people remain with capital and AI all the rest are replaced. Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant. But here is an even more interesting question: As their AI can create anything why would they pay each…
For instance: it'd expect money to become near-meaningless, and the economic activity of the trillionaire class will consist mostly of direct extraction and consumption of resources (basically a personal autarky). There may be some barter of things like energy, raw materials, and maybe a small amount of proprietary items.
Given the lack of need to pay labor and the direct control of more resources than they'll ever need, the trillionaire will direct the world enonomy to towards pet projects (e.g. an Elon Musk commanding his robot army to build a giant steel pyramid on the moon in his honor, because why not? It'll be cool!).
I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not only is the premise wrong The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy. If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
I absolutely can imagine a society organized around some other source(s) of happiness, but the fact is we don't have that society, and humans are not acclimated to that society. Humans are acclimated to the society we have, and there's plenty of research out there showing that many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
And when they lose their job and can't find satisfying work, their quality of life is meaningfully impacted, in ways that cannot be fully explained by the financial impact of losing a job.
Another fine example is retirement. Many older people end up finding work again in retirement, not because they need the money, but because it helps them find purpose. Others don't retire until the day they die because they can't imagine a life without work. Yes, some people love retirement and are happy and thrive, but there are also many who aren't and don't.