Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

gmalandrakis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 613 posts

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#21

Post by throwway120385 »

skybrian wrote: post #8
monknomo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip.

What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#23

Post by atleastoptimal »

Many people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe.

The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc)

If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#25

Post by stevenwoo »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #13
throw391912321 wrote: post #10

I'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…

All workable policy paths involve taxing capital and you're gonna call that Marxist even though it isn't, so we're at an impasse.

Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#26

Post by jplusequalt »

throw391912321 wrote: post #10

I'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…

>reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history

Not that I agree with all of Marx's ideas, but I think this is one of his less controversial ideas. There has always been a class struggle between business owners and workers, and there probably always will be.

>anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy

An increasing amount of US citizens have little to no trust in our government to actually come up with a viable solution that helps the people in a world where AI automation is happening across multiple sectors at once.

You want to address the paranoia people feel? You have to also address that lack of trust in our government. That's a tall order.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#27

Post by confidantlake »

sdevonoes wrote: post #19

Isn’t it clear that the “enemy” of 99% of the people in the world (and in HN) are the ultra rich? Therefore we shouldn’t use Claude/Gemini/OpenAI? It’s not about stopping progress, rather stopping the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful over our lives. Whether we can use claude to automate a fucking script or service is meaningless compared to that. The dream of elon musk et al is to keep accumulating power a…

Damn downvoted to oblivion 3 minutes after you posted this. The bots are out in force on this one.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#28

Post by bediger4000 »

Once the owning class owns mostly everything and* has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them. It barely has real consequences for them already -as they have consistently ended up richer after the dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the covid recession.*

The coming out richer part is undeniably true, but I have doubts about the conclusion, which is something like "after oligarchs own everything, they don't need many people". Look, even the old Bell System required participation of about a third of the US population.

Oligarchs might be able to have young, fit concubines, and loyal, retainers with steel thews if there's a population of less than a third of today, but they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists. Telegram communications might be possible, but who's going to maintain gigawatts of data centers for such a population? I'm pretty sure "AI" will slip away in such a world, but who needs waifus when real harems can exist?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#29

Post by kingstnap »

What AI really seems to be posed to do is make labour a lot less valuable and capital a lot more valuable.

Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#30

Post by hurtigioll »

Quinner wrote: post #9

For 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 po…

I guess you don't know about North Korea
Post reply on HN