Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#2This seems the kind of (scarily true) thing I’d expect Charles Stross to write about.
Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#3Suppose 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.
Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#4[flagged]
Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#5Suppose 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 A…
I think this mentions that AI Island also has robots than can produce most goods
Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#6Inb4 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.
Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#7Inb4 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!
Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#8Suppose 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 A…
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?
Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#9For 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.
Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
#10I'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.