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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#111

Post by rogerrogerr »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #91
dyauspitr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Without jobs, and after our savings run out, we will be homeless people. Then, after that, we can try to bargain for ... whatever homeless people get in this society. It doesn't look like much to me. Call it 'basic income' if that helps.

If I’m one of the six people who ends up with all the money and controlling all the robots, why do I want your 3 bed 2 bath house in Tennessee? Trying to take it from you will only make you riot.

It’s not exactly a bright outlook, but I do think we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now.

Of course, your average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#112

Post by lazide »

jaggederest wrote: post #86
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…

To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.

They literally always frantically try to accumulate more wealth. It’s their dominant trait.

It’s just working better for a few of them right now than it historically has.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#113

Post by lazide »

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…

Bots defrauding bots while training new fraud bots.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#115

Post by wyldfire »

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…

Physics, or ... capital.

Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining.

Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#116

Post by dyauspitr »

mc32 wrote: post #76
dyauspitr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think everyone who is able should earn their keep. From ants to lions, to survive and live, even if in meager spurts they must put in some work.

Well yes, that how it has always been. But if robots do the labor we don’t have to abide by that nonsense anymore. It’s a paradigm shift.

I realize we’re probably not going to see it in our lifetimes but that will be the norm in the future.

Also that extremely ingrained mindset of earning your keep is exactly what keeps most of the world working hard while the elite jetset and live a life of pleasure.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#117

Post by whack »

Imagine if the top 0.001% build and jointly own an ASI that makes human labor completely obsolete in every single way. This seems like the worst case scenario for the rest of us, right? Wrong. In this scenario, these 0.001% would not interact with the rest of us in any way. They will not hire us, they will not buy anything from us, and they will not sell anything to us either. After all, the rest of us are completely obsolete to them, so what benefit could they possibly have in interacting with us? They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.

At that point, from the perspective of the rest of us, they simply don't exist. And their ASI wouldn't exist either. We would get back to the world as it was pre-ASI. One where all of us need stuff that others among us can offer, and we hire one another and buy stuff from one another. Sure, things aren't as great as they could have been. But the status quo isn't the worst thing in the world either.

The scenario that is a lot more concerning/weird is the more realistic one, where ASI makes 99% of human labor obsolete - but not the remaining 1%. At that point, the ASI owners will hold American-idol style auditions where thousands of hopefuls vie for the opportunity to be in that lucky 1%. Auditions where we beg and plead shamelessly to be chosen by the ASI owners. Auditions where the losers are left to scrounge for the 2nd hand, 3rd hand, and 4th hand scraps, that trickle down from the 1%.

I hope to god that when an ASI is built, and in the unlikely case that it doesn't simply overthrow humanity, that we will have a political structure in place that gives everyone a meaningful share in the fruits of ASI. Or that the owners of this ASI consider every other human to be utterly useless, f off to their Randian paradise, and leave the rest of us completely alone. The middle ground between these two is where dystopia lives

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#118

Post by johnsmith1840 »

Jtarii wrote: post #58
po1nt wrote: 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.

Giving away things is not mandatory. If a homeless man is dependent on you to leave money for him and you stop one day it's not your fault he has a tough time.

In the same sense Africa is far better off now than it has ever been because of advances in the west.

Probally the same for humans and hyper future AI. We will not have the recources they do but will naturally have 100x better lives because of them even though it will be deeply unequal.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#119

Post by pianopatrick »

The idea that the economy is based on "consumption" depends on how you define "consumption".

If you think of "consumption" as "buying real world products from Wal Mart or Amazon" then that is wrong, the US economy is not really based on that.

Most GDP in the US comes from the service sector. And one thing is true about human nature - a lot of people like having other people serve them.

There are many things that machines can do for us but we still pay people to do them for us. For example, machines in a food plant can cook pasta and pack that pasta into a frozen dinner that you could eat at home. But people still like going out for a pasta dinner

So even if AI is going to replace a whole lot of jobs, you would still have some people paying others to serve them just because people like having other people serve them.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#120

Post by peterldowns »

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…

Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.
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