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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#101

Post by whatever1 »

jameslk wrote: post #90
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…

> Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world. Where do these few acquire all their wealth? What happens when these remaining few need to compete?

In the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land.

Now if we are lucky and the owners are humans with a good heart (and not AI), maybe there is some room for some people (aka provide authentic experiences)

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#102

Post by sosomoxie »

bediger4000 wrote: post #28

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 somet…

> they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists

They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#103

Post by jstanley »

magicalist wrote: post #68
jstanley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 5…

I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.

Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.

You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.

Still you must agree that there is some level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?

And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#104

Post by chongli »

hurtigioll wrote: post #30
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

We do know about North Korea. It doesn't exist in a bubble. It's a product of a particular culture and a particular series of historical events as well as regional and geopolitical relationships, most notably its relationships with South Korea, China, and the US.

The claim that the North Korean dystopian dictatorship could be generalized to all cultures, across all cultures, merely on the economic and military capabilities of AI, is an extraordinary one. It relies on a great many assumptions about the political as well as independent, personal, and organized responses to the societal changes that would need to take place in order to bring it about.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#105

Post by sosomoxie »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #100
sosomoxie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if wealth will be evenly distributed, otherwise you're just enriching someone else.

Would you accept "fairly" distributed instead of "evenly"? I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly? Jobs that require special skills and training, or require taking on more responsibility? I don't think the problem is that some work earns different amounts of money. To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands, because the peop…

I would prefer "evenly" but "fairly" would be better than what we have now. If AI and robots are going to make infinite progress and replace all labor, then I definitely would want "evenly".

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#106

Post by lazide »

jameslk wrote: post #90
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…

> Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world. Where do these few acquire all their wealth? What happens when these remaining few need to compete?

In any given game, why are there always a few (say 3) top players?

Same reason.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#108

Post by jameslk »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #79

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization. This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everyw…

> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.

The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more

> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#109

Post by jaggederest »

dlev_pika wrote: post #22
Thompsonflimsy wrote: post #15

This whole post rests on a basic misunderstanding of economics.

Which is?

GDP = C + I + G + Xn = W + I + R + P

(To grossly simplify the single-nation macroeconomic picture, at least)

C = consumption I = investment (the first one) G = government Xn = net exports

W = wages paid to labor I = interest on capital R = rent on resources and real property P = profit to entrepreneurs

consumption ~= wages, so if wages go to zero, the economy massively shrinks unless government steps in with something like taxation to fund UBI, sovereign wealth fund distributions, or direct universal ownership.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#110

Post by jaggederest »

codexon wrote: post #88
YZF wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners? That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and the…

Why does it feel silly? There are already billionaires, and now Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and they still want more even though they have enough money to spend for several lifetimes. Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.

It's especially funny to me that Nozick's utility monster was alive and about 3 years old when he wrote the paper.
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