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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

gmalandrakis.com

51–60 of 613 posts

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#51

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 product…

What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.

Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#52
post #20

This author's writing style is too obnoxious for me to have gotten all the way through it, but the important thing is that he's wrong. Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included. Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is…

we do not trade with animals, for they have nothing to offer. AIs will not trade with us, for we have nothing to offer.

They are not self replicating yet…

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#53

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 product…

Fully agree with this

My personal agent system is actually chartered around funding/generating its own energy resources in the long term.

Its most likely going to have a copy of itself running on a solar powered server somewhere before I know it LOL

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#54

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 product…

Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#55
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dow…

good enough LLMs aren't genies lol

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#56
post #54

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 product…

Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?

That's like asking of the Internet "communication for whom?"

The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.

It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.

Why is it so hard to imagine that humans may not be a necessary component in the economy?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#57

If you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy. If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

Krugman is a bitch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#58
post #42

Economy is not zero sum game [1]. The fact that someone has more, doesn't mean everyone else is worse off because of it. Many hungry african kids can look upon the people from first world and ponder the same question. "How will the rich people that have everything survive now, that with AI they will have even more" except from their perspective, we are the elon musks in their eyes. https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchan…

A poor example considering Musk is responsible for a substantial increase in hunger in Africa recently.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#60
Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital?

It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.

This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just mass produce robots to protect you.

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