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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#61

Post by muvlon »

sp527 wrote: post #37
hurtigioll wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AIs are not conscious and do not have real needs that are detached from a real person. That can certainly be simulated , but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.

We would not be able to agree on that. Already today, some of the people who would actually be able to unplug some of them (Anthropic) are worrying about "model welfare". I think you are not putting together how much of an anti-human death cult this is.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#62

Post by dodu_ »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #23

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…

Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).

This timeline is straight ass.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#65

Post by __s »

codexon wrote: post #49

I've held this view and talked about it many times here before. It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat. Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI c…

Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#66

Post by leptons »

throwway120385 wrote: post #21
skybrian wrote: 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…

Except very few people will actually be able to buy beetroot or anything else because there won't be any jobs. The wealth is all concentrating at the top into very few hands.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#67

Post by annzabelle »

mawadev wrote: post #51
atleastoptimal wrote: post #23

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…

"AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#68

Post by magicalist »

jstanley wrote: post #56
xg15 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.

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

I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?

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

But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.

Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...

But if a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#69

Post by dyauspitr »

whatever1 wrote: post #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…

Whatever, let it happen. Humans working on anything other than exactly what they want to do is stupid. The few will eventually have to give the masses the necessities at some point though that can happen in one of two ways, from the very beginning or wrested forcefully after a painful era. Both are better than the current paradigm of what is essentially slavery with extra steps. A world where a human can work exactly on whatever they’re passionate about or not work at all if they don’t want to is the ideal.
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