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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

gmalandrakis.com

351–360 of 613 posts

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#351
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.

Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.

You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#352
Regarding the unstable times: Consider living in any year in the past 50 years or so. There are shocks and game-changing events happening subsequently after each of the year you have possibly chosen. Oil crisis here, war there, collapse of some country, technological breakthrough, etc.. Unless you live in countries, where you don't plan for years, but for months or days upfront. Then your life is much more stereotypical, when you just try to survive every day.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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 Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive

From people I know who traveled, the people in thatched huts are sometimes reported to be far happier than we are.

And a lot of people in the US can't afford hospitals or antibiotics today.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#354
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht 0. https://www.paulgraha…

What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year? While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave wo…

> Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.

Sounds like a poshy neighborhood colonized by expats. I mean, I do share the values but it's definitely a luxury and entitled position (with its own consequences on the rest of the locals sharing the same city)

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Everyone wants more

John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do.

Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive.

It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved.

It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#356
Honestly, this blog is pretty silly and the reason is that the blog author is conflating multiple concepts, while failing to have a grasp of basic aspects of human organization (I honestly am at the point where accusing someone of not having a grasp of basic aspects of economics is a meaningless phrase, since mainstream economics is purely mathematical and is devoid of anything grounded in reality or the history of humanity).

What comes before an economy? Self sufficiency aka autark production and consumption. You produce exactly what you will consume. Note that eliminating "consumption" is illogical, since any elimination of "consumption" by necessity also entails the elimination of "production" and since humans are mortal, abstaining from consumption will lead to death. The same applies to any machine that needs energy or maintenance.

"Peopleless economy?" conflates the idea of machines or AI as economic agents and the idea of the rich withdrawing from the public market, by expanding their autarky.

The fallacy here is that you cannot simultaneously withdraw from the market and dominate it. If the rich decide that AI has advanced far enough that they don't need a single human to work under them anymore and they pack up their stuff and teleport a section of earth to Mars or a space colony, where the non-rich people cannot reach them, those rich people have ceded their influence on Earth.

When you play Factorio you build a fully automated ever expanding factory completely without any other people. There is no market economy here, because there is no trading here.

When you play on a Minecraft server with an automation modpack, most people won't play together. In fact, they will start from scratch, because it is more fun that way.

>Those humans are then paid for their services, work, or ideas, and can keep on buying food and housing from the owning class to survive. But guess what: once the machines get the role of producing and conceiving things, those humans are no longer economically necessary.

Again, another fallacy. The humans doing the consumption here are generating the reason for the machines' existence. If you unemploy the consumers, you unemploy the producers, even if the producer is a machine. Now that the rich own a huge pile of machines that they don't need, they will get rid of them and downsize their factory to just what they need for themselves. They will retreat into an autark mode of production.

There's just one issue. People can still exist in the old "obsolete" non-autark mode of production at the loss of productivity. If there are people who need food and the old producers have left the market, new low productivity producers will enter the market to replace them. Hence, the autark mode of production is inherently a cessation of power.

Now the obvious counter argument is that society can devolve back into feudalism where everyone is fighting over land and resources and the only thing that changed is that the peasant class was merely substituted by robots, but this is a completely different topic from what the blog post addresses. "The Economy" in the blog is about trading/employment, not about whose name is written in the land registry for a given plot of land or that there are standing robot armies re-enacting robot feudalism.

>Our world is so perverse, that it should not be impossible for you to imagine that after AI taking over, The Economy relies entirely on virtual transactions between companies with no product or service, that the 'consumption' only refers to powering the AI machines, and everyone else is homeless or dead.

Yet another fallacy. Companies can do useless transactions between each other if they want to for the sake of role playing, but why would they? They can downsize and stop producing things. The blog post here is actually committing the very thing it claims to argue against. It imagines a future that is exactly the same, except for the one thing that is changing. So the blog is critiquing itself for its lack of imagination.

>The implicit assumptions that lead to the conclusion that we are needed for The Economy to keep running, are erroneous. So are most conclusions about The Economy, even when they come from experts: ask ten economists the same question, and you will get ten different answers or predictions.

At this point it feels like the author has a fundamental misunderstanding what an economy is. Machines are built in response to a demand that makes them necessary. In the absence of demand, the machine is idle but still produces costs, which makes it profitable to get rid of it. If there is a single human on the planet you don't need an elaborate agricultural society, you don't need machines, you don't need to hold onto land, you can just live as a hunter gatherer nomad. If you could have a hyper tech machine that grants you the living standard of today, you still wouldn't need to conquer the entire planet, you would leave it as is.

The biggest failure of this blog post is that it fails to actually address the disequilibrium factors. The position it fights against is actually completely logical in an assumed "always in equilibrium" economy. It doesn't mention land as a non-reproducable factor that must be divided among the population or money as a monopoly that you are obligated to use for trading despite its ability to be accumulated. Those two factors can disrupt or are immune to equilibrium, but in both cases if there was a way to build your own substitute land or substitute money, there wouldn't be any problem.

In fact, you could say that the fundamental problem is that wildly different people are sharing the same planet. If every human had their own planet, none of the raised issues would exist.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#357
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minds keep humans as pets.

I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".

Free-to-roam pets are still pets. The Minds are benevolent dictators, and generally seek not to be seen as such by humans.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.

Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#359
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minds keep humans as pets.

I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".

What would the Minds do if all humans wanted to leave?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#360
post #343

Questions.... - what powers the robots? How is this power source maintained? - when a robot is damaged, how is it repaired and where do the raw materials come from? - when a robot simply doesn't work properly, who assesses the issue and resolves it? - with 99% of the world population presumably starving to death, what is stopping them from overthrowing whoever is starving them to death?

- electricity (from solar, hydro, nuclear, whatever). maintained by robots. - it is repaired by robots using resources mined or reclaimed by robots. - you guessed it, robots. - robots with weapons. If we actually want to prevent this doomsday scenario, I don't think it's wise to bet on "robots will never be able to do X".

- you'll need to invent these robots first, so whats the ETA?

- same as above

- ditto

- a bit skynet, but it will still require humans in the loop. This is the least whacky though as it actually exists

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