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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

gmalandrakis.com

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#121

Post by totetsu »

whack wrote: post #117

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…

Unless this ASI either way, turns the world into an opencast mine and burns off the atmosphere on the way out..

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#122

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#123

Post by stephc_int13 »

peterldowns wrote: post #120
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.

I have not, but I am curious.

I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#124

Post by pj_mukh »

Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1].

tl;dr: The most likely scenario is that AI affects us at the scale of the internet. Revolutionary, but nothing that fundamentally gets rid of labor economics (like this article posits).

[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#125

Post by whatever1 »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #111
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stand…

You will need electricity, water you will be producing waste etc. in your Tennessee house. Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you?

Really I don’t see any playable alternative other than near complete annihilation of human race. It’s very similar to a nuclear apocalypse. Very few get to survive.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#126

Post by baron816 »

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…

Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized.

The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#127

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

jameslk wrote: post #108
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…

> Everyone wants more

Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#128

Post by PaulHoule »

koe123 wrote: post #81
andrewmutz wrote: post #11

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.

I come from a research background, and transitioned to software later. There is an interesting tendency of software engineers to believe they have skills outside of their skillset. Relevant here: the would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?

Part of my software engineering skillset is "going native" with subject matter experts to be able to get more out out of them and even work around the lack of sufficient SME on a project.

I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#129

Post by sieabahlpark »

pianopatrick wrote: post #119

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 mach…

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#130

Post by maest »

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…

"fair" involves a value judgement and requires a moral system. "even" is pure mathematics.

> I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly?

Agreeing with that is easy. Agreeing with which jobs should be compensated more highly is hard. Because everyone has different morality systems.

> To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands

I know people who strongly believe Bezos and other billionaires are being compensated for the value they've brought to their customers via their businesses.

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