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The Education of a Doomer

borretti.me

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Re: The Education of a Doomer

#11

Post by Barrin92 »

paulpauper wrote: post #5

I’ve never had this worry. When I was funemployed last year, I spent my time reading books and writing code and hanging out with friends. If the future is an infinite UBI-funded vacation, I know what I’ll do. “Before the Singularity, read books and throw house parties; after the singularity, etc.” yeah it's obvious the author has a really high IQ who can keep himself busy with intellectual pursuits and a nice social…

Kohei Saito writes about this at length in Capital in the Anthropocene. Most obvious solution is to build an economy around social labor that has traditionally been externalized to households by capital. Start collectively paying people to take care of each other, children, the commons, public infrastructure and so on.

As ecological concerns and automation eliminate a large chunk of production it's pointless to maintain a system that only knows how to finance exactly that stuff, so socialize the gains of those and start redirecting them to socially necessary labor. There's much more to do than just playing boardgames.

Re: The Education of a Doomer

#12

Post by bananaflag »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #7
paulpauper wrote: post #5

I’ve never had this worry. When I was funemployed last year, I spent my time reading books and writing code and hanging out with friends. If the future is an infinite UBI-funded vacation, I know what I’ll do. “Before the Singularity, read books and throw house parties; after the singularity, etc.” yeah it's obvious the author has a really high IQ who can keep himself busy with intellectual pursuits and a nice social…

For those with low IQ like me, there's video games, movies, piracy, parties, and hiking.

And probably AI will make those even more addictive

Re: The Education of a Doomer

#13

Post by bumblehean »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #8

> if humans are economically useless, the state does not need them. Why pay out UBI to people who have neither economic nor political power? Forgive me if I'm naïve. But wouldn't people just vote for UBI in this case?

The cynical view would be that all of our politicians are already bought and paid for, and existing political establishments would block any "serious" candidates who support those sorts of policies.

Personally I think that's likely the case _today_, but who knows if that would hold if/when there comes a time when UBI becomes an economic necessity.

Re: The Education of a Doomer

#14

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #8

> if humans are economically useless, the state does not need them. Why pay out UBI to people who have neither economic nor political power? Forgive me if I'm naïve. But wouldn't people just vote for UBI in this case?

What leverage would you have to enforce the will of the vote on those that control things?

Re: The Education of a Doomer

#16

Post by saulpw »

rahulyc wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what happens (I think no one does), but with every other technology, I can opt-out if I don't want to use it. Even if I get unemployed, I don't see how I can opt-out when it comes to everyone everywhere using it. Governments historically have considered humans as assets - it's even called "human capital", and they require us for tax revenue and to run the state. What happens when we aren't needed? Even i…

National governments which can print their own currency don't require people for tax revenue. They use taxes to compel people to acquire their currency to give it value. If they can instead compel AIs to acquire their currency, they won't need humans for that either.

Re: The Education of a Doomer

#17

Post by perching_aix »

TL;DR: the same tired points you've read a million times already

"It might be slop but at least it's human slop!" - would the author argue in turn, probably:

> People used to argue online, flame each other, get angry. And that wasn’t good, but at least it was human. [0]

Another perspective though could be that one's thoughts were never meant to be guaranteed high-entropy curio for others to encounter, so they're really under no obligation to be found "original", if that even means anything. [1] And sure, that is true.

Just also not any more true than the former.

[0] emphasis theirs, I don't even need to mock it like this; the secondhand embarrassment comes built-in

[1] this is to say, these may be genuinely candid and original thoughts from the author, that simply happen to coincide with the many thoughts already expressed in this genre of writing

Re: The Education of a Doomer

#18

Post by OgsyedIE »

rahulyc wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what happens (I think no one does), but with every other technology, I can opt-out if I don't want to use it. Even if I get unemployed, I don't see how I can opt-out when it comes to everyone everywhere using it. Governments historically have considered humans as assets - it's even called "human capital", and they require us for tax revenue and to run the state. What happens when we aren't needed? Even i…

The 'voice' anybody has is some function of their capital, ability to leverage it and ability to prevent its erosion by theft, fraud, seduction/politics scams and honeytrapping. Humans can still acquire capital in the future in several ways, although their ability to not be parted from it is in doubt.

1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing or newly created works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed or disfavored,

2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of other's mental labour in the performing arts,

3: legal labour in acting as an agent to help or hinder existing legal processes in systems that give humans standing,

4: biological labour as a substrate for growing certain transplantable products,

5: smuggling labour (either non-invasive or surgically invasive),

6: political labour to incrementally sway electoral results in any polity where you are still enfranchised,

7: security labour as a canary for infohazards (such as 'diplomat' programs produced by another ASI) inside of a quarantined environment,

8: frontman work as a deniable patsy to enable economic forgery, deception, revenge or warfare by some hypergraph of patron AGIs and the superorganisms they compose with, or without, your knowledge of what your work entails.

Some of these have a strong factor of supply and demand. You can increase your market value by reducing the supply of other humans competing for these revenue sources.

Re: The Education of a Doomer

#19

Post by simonw »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #8

> if humans are economically useless, the state does not need them. Why pay out UBI to people who have neither economic nor political power? Forgive me if I'm naïve. But wouldn't people just vote for UBI in this case?

The US can't even vote for universal healthcare. I have real trouble seeing a path for UBI.

Re: The Education of a Doomer

#20

Post by schmidtleonard »

saulpw wrote: post #16
rahulyc wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what happens (I think no one does), but with every other technology, I can opt-out if I don't want to use it. Even if I get unemployed, I don't see how I can opt-out when it comes to everyone everywhere using it. Governments historically have considered humans as assets - it's even called "human capital", and they require us for tax revenue and to run the state. What happens when we aren't needed? Even i…

National governments which can print their own currency don't require people for tax revenue. They use taxes to compel people to acquire their currency to give it value. If they can instead compel AIs to acquire their currency, they won't need humans for that either.

Yes, they can print, but they can also tax capital. It's not actually impossible. We already do it a tiny bit, we've done it more in the past, and contrary to the dogma blasted from the billionaire-owned media outlets and drilled in billionaire-think-tank-approved Econ 101 curricula the universe will not actually explode if we do it again.
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