501–510 of 613 posts
That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.
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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 g…
This happens a lot in real estate. The work is all contracted out.
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What would keep people from circumventing a roboticized society and forming their own human-based society? Buy good and services produced by other people and avoid and or penalize members who cheat -ostracize them. There can be parallel systems. Pretty much only communist systems prevent non-communist systems from operating. In capitalist systems communist systems that form from time to time fail because members grow…
In an hypothetical future where society has completely broken down because of extreme concentration of wealth (and means of production and everything) I can see there not being any possibility for a human-based society. In such a doomsday scenario, regular people wouldn't be able to trade anything because they wouldn't be able to produce anything, because all the land will be taken over by the very few ultrarich. Now…
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Yes, predicting the future was never possible. In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak. Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children and live life through the great plague, through middle ages in which most of the population expected the apocalypse to be just around the corner, the 30 years war with up to 70% of the populatio…
Folks did not have kids during WW1 though: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalité_en_France#/media/Fich... :)
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> In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak In the past, this was a reason to have children, because you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old. Now, it's a reason not to have children, because you're putting people into a world knowing that there is a non-trivial probability that they will suffer all their lives through wars, famine, social unrest, a…
But a lower probability than ever before in human history of those things
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> 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 […] This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable": > Now it is true tha…
TIL! Thank you. Let’s try: George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours. People usually want more. But at many times and within many social movements— religious, political, artistic— people have chosen to want less. Maybe that is part of the answer.
And George Collins is wrong. My rent (for two people) is 1000€ (60m²), electricity is 150, food is 600, internet 50, total of about 2000. Say 1000 since we split that in half, and maybe i'll even reduce those needs, live in a smaller space, heat myself less in winter so it goes down to 800.
That's about 35 hours of work for the absolute bare minimum, 70 including my wife. That means no car, using my bike for everything, eating objectively worse food for my health (not talking about caviar there), get rid of pets, etc, etc.
one full week of worth each to cover the bare minimum. and let's be honest, I'm quite well off there. People on median income would _die_. They already do, working the full month.
George Collins would do well to read more sociology and not generalize.
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> 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.
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In an hypothetical future where society has completely broken down because of extreme concentration of wealth (and means of production and everything) I can see there not being any possibility for a human-based society. In such a doomsday scenario, regular people wouldn't be able to trade anything because they wouldn't be able to produce anything, because all the land will be taken over by the very few ultrarich. Now…
Unless expropriation happens the rich can’t simply take over land. They still have to buy it. Ted Turner, Bill Gates still had to buy land from individuals. So unless people sell all their land to these people, there will still be land.
(edit: removed a wall of text that was repeating my previous comment).
What I describe can start gradually, like arguably it may be already happening, and pick up speed after a certain tipping point. After enough automation + concentration of power and wealth has been achieved, then the masks can fall off.
And then...
> Unless expropriation happens
Exactly. If you're completely amoral and powerful, you only buy or ask for permission if the other side has something to bargain with (such as labor or violent revolt). If they don't anymore, and you have all the force in the world, why not simply take whatever you want?
It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it? Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high. A leap of faith is req…
Yes, predicting the future was never possible. In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak. Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children and live life through the great plague, through middle ages in which most of the population expected the apocalypse to be just around the corner, the 30 years war with up to 70% of the populatio…
True, but...
> In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak.
No, the rate of change was slow enough that you could probably make a good-enough prediction: your life would be similar to that of your father's or grandfathers'.
The problem is that nowadays, some foolish technology-worshiping assholes have pushed the rate of change faster than almost anyone can handle: before we've started to learn to deal with the problems of one technology, another technology disrupts everything again. Society needs to operate at a human scale, and a human speed, or it will kill itself.
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> The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything. Yes, but how it changes depends entirely on who owns the robots. There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, and huge evidence that self-centered wealthy billionaires (and trillionaires!) will own them. In such a case, the response to "the robots will make everything" isn't "so give it away to the people for fre…
>There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, But that is up to the people and their governments to decide. You seem to miss the fact that governments are made by people and for the people, and not made by the billionaires. Even a billionaire have a single vote. Government can outlaw the private ownership of combat autonomous robots if that is what the people want.
This is laughably naïve in 2026. There's been massive amounts of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other forms of legal vote-rigging in the US, not to mention the tremendous amount of propaganda that's been fed to the country for decades in support of the oligarchs' agenda.
And then we get into the even darker possibilities, such as Trump's repeated suggestions that we don't need to vote again, that he could have a third term, his thanks to Musk for delivering him the election, etc.
And frankly, if you think that the disposition of the hypothetical robots is up to the people to decide, then surely you must believe that the current state of Western governments in 2026 genuinely represents the will of the people. If you extend that line of thought out logically, then just as surely you must conclude that there is, at least, a very high probability that the people would decide to give the robots to the oligarchs, even knowing that those robots would kill said people.