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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#231

Post by qsera »

shimman wrote: post #207
qsera wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free? As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that. >Taxes from what.. Maintaining robots, may be. When tha…

The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5]. All these programs poll above majorities in th…

>but you have to pay for the privilege too...

You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.

>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.

Tell me, how many elites have a nuclear weapon.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#232

Post by pixl97 »

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…

Yea, the original statistic was not about bytes, but about connections, in which 57% of all traffic on the web is not from a direct human action.

>But these bytes are in service of a human?

I mean, lets say that 99.9% of all traffic on the net was by one person running an AI to get them rich, we'd call that traffic 'in service of a human' by your set of rules but it does kind of break historically how pretty much all communication in history worked until we started controlling stuff with wires and radios. That is, one person with one prompt can cause a hell of a lot of communication now.

And we're not even at the point of AGI/ASI yet. That's when some other agent with their non-human goals can start doing things.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#233

Post by koe123 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #128
koe123 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a similar track, and I agree that its a useful skill and talent.

What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#234

Post by dyauspitr »

mc32 wrote: post #188
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than a mindset, it also takes quite a bit of money to live in a permanent vacation 24/7, even modestly. Aside from the income, employment also has a way of occupying one’s time. Without that, one would often spend additional funds on various forms of entertainment (books, movies, crafts, travel, etc.)…

Without direction or a pull in life people tend to self-destruct. Even the wealthy are susceptible to this. Hollywood nepotites are a nice example: they live off their parents's wealth or easily acquired money and self-destroy themselves. They are not engaging in higher pursuits but rather basic degeneration. Not all of course; some do good, productive things.

Many people will I think but not most. Also, since we’re talking about fantastical things, you could have lots of things to mitigate this. If someone has a pattern of self-destructive behavior, you could essentially have two robots follow them around everywhere as a more effective ankle bracelet. And they’re specifically tasked with keeping you from trouble and stopping you from ruining your life. Maybe that can replace prisons.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#235

Post by qsera »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #212
qsera wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.. How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea? >Who owns the robots though.. I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

It is never really “for free”. It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work. They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc. No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.

>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.

But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#236

Post by pixl97 »

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…

>They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.

See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.

Their servers need energy, their bots need materials, these things come from real ownership of land. There are also things said rich people like, such as beautiful locations. And all of these beautiful locations are filled with ugly stinky people that are more poor than them. At least some of these rich people will want to 'deal' with this problem.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#237

Post by littlexsparkee »

graphime wrote: post #59
smallmancontrov wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god I can just FEEL the growth! It's going to trickle down any second now! Any second!

[dead]

That's helpful if you're privileged enough to amass enough to invest before labor's share of output collapses.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#238

Post by pixl97 »

skybrian wrote: post #44
throwway120385 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's getting way ahead of ourselves considering that currently, AI can't even be trusted to run a vending machine. Also, if that's such a great deal, why not invest in someone else's company that runs a farm? Let's say we have two companies, one which has a human manager (and maybe uses AI for research) and one that just has AI. Is the AI really going to do better?

The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.

As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.

It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#239

Post by theptip »

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 important question is, who has power in such an economy?

In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.

Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.

I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#240

Post by pixl97 »

beloch wrote: post #192

"Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them." ---------------- This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them. To put it another way, if you have comman…

Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.
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