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You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

geohot.github.io

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Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#141

Post by d1sxeyes »

weinzierl wrote: post #74
fnoef wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed an interesting pattern. People who “made it” usually by working high paying jobs for the neofeudal lords, suddenly gain moral compass and tell the rest of us to not work for said neofeudal lords, because “money is not important”, and apparently you can buy a place to live or food to feed your family simply by having principles.

I agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example. Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out. I guess not unlike many of us here on HN. Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. I…

Then he should know better the line he’s selling.

“Opt out of capitalism” doesn’t work when you’re trying to feed your family. He offers no alternative, speaks from a place of safety with no acknowledgment that the people he’s addressing don’t have the same safety net as he does.[0]

He’s not wrong. We are all fucked. But if it were as simple as “not participating” (whatever that means), then we wouldn’t be.

[0]: to be fair he does address others at tech companies, maybe he assumes that everyone working in big tech has a safety net, which is perhaps not as unreasonable as I first thought.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#142

Post by OgsyedIE »

WithinReason wrote: post #135
OgsyedIE wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though the three categories you describe include niches like museum attraction or vehicle piloting in legal niches that still respect humans, a little creativity expands your options for post-ASI work: 1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed, 2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of…

I had to get to 4 to realize this is sarcasm

Sometimes the easiest method of communicating something is the best one. That said, every one of these jobs has had multiple historical examples of humans giving paid employment to other humans for them, even #7.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#143

Post by anal_reactor »

Llamamoe wrote: post #97
mmaunder wrote: post #19

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is. It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it sole…

The answer is obvious: abandon civilisation, join the Amish. Big Tech cannot ruin your life if you simply don't participate in the capitalistic market. I mean sure, it's difficult to live completely off-grid, but in modern world, it's a long way before you starve to death.

What I'm saying is, I have a cozy bullshit job that gives me the perspective of someday not being in the working class anymore. But if that wasn't the case, I'd 100% fuck that and look for alternative lifestyles.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#144

Post by eddythompson80 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #42
mmaunder wrote: post #19

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. In general, yes. For many groups, no. It assumes that there is something of value for them to do and as shown by masses of long term unemployed in many areas, that is not always the case. For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high u…

> For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment.

> If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart.

I think the problems here is you’re comparing a relative minority to “all humans”. Unfortunately, what affects a minority of society, inherently, has a small effect on society as a whole. If “all humans” now have no employment value because AI or automation can do it all, there will still be a cost to that production. Even if you assume the AI part is $0, the power needed or the raw materials becomes the main cost as opposed to labor. Then you need to have enough demand from those non-working non-wage-earning humans for whatever that AI is producing. Otherwise, what is the point of the production in the first place.

Maybe extreme automation would put the wealth gab on hyper drive. Only those handful who happen to own an automated production company can have any income. However, what do you imagine the final outcome of that would be in a democratic society? Like I know it’s fashionable to cry at the state of democracy, but despite the recent inflation and affordability crisis and income insecurity etc, we don’t have an “all humans” levels of unemployments. What do you think would happen if we automate, and subsequently fire, “all humans”?

Let’s assume AI will actually replace 99% of jobs eventually. Society will completely change at that time to adapt. What else is the point? Are AIs gonna be producing stuff for other AIs leisure?

The problem is that the road to there might be painful before society is forced to change to adapt. It won’t all happen at once so it’ll keep happening in waves and waves will be painful until they get better then another wave again. That’s assuming the prophecy of “all humans” labor is no longer needed.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#145

Post by DiscourseFan »

pram wrote: post #126
DiscourseFan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.

You are the first person I've seen try and say TSMC, Broadcom, etc aren't "big tech" lol

I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#146

Post by lurk2 »

roenxi wrote: post #85
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, you can still do everything you could yesterday. You can still hand-weave cloth and sell it if you want to, just like your ancestors could do three hundred years ago; you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread, because even though bread is cheaper than it used to be, your customer's next best alternative is an automatic loom, and t…

I'm pretty sure you're literally just wrong on that one - no special knowledge of the weaving market but it seems people do still make a living from hand-weaving fabric. Eg, I found https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics - they claim to have a shop in New York. They can probably afford bread - bread is quite cheap. The issue is if bread becomes insanely cheap and cloth becomes insanely cheap, then a v…

Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West. You can still produce things like handwoven cloth, bespoke rocking chairs, and novelty birdhouses, but you market them primarily to an upscale clientele. It’s next to impossible to compete on price when the average consumer is basing their idea of what a thing is worth on products being assembled by machinery in countries where labor is cheap and regulatory compliance is negligible.

So you go after high-income earners who are not concerned with price, but this requires proximity, networking, and then on-going relationship management with a much smaller group of people who are all much more likely to talk to each other.

Effectively, this is the problem the grandparent comment outlined with extra steps; it isn’t your labor by itself that is uniquely valuable, it is your relationship with buyers, and those relationships can sour. Vendors who signed on with Walmart experienced something similar where they began scaling to meet demand only to find themselves completely reliant on Walmart’s orders to service their loans. Walmart was then free to dictate the terms of the relationship. This is a very familiar dynamic in societies that never successfully divorced themselves from feudal ideas (e.g. Most of South Asia, parts of South America).

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#147

Post by redox99 »

energy123 wrote: post #69

An economics counter argument: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-... Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.

Maybe p(doom) without AGI is 1.0 in the long term, but I'll be dead by then. But AGI definitely increases the p(doom) within my lifetime.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#148

Post by DiscourseFan »

roenxi wrote: post #128
DiscourseFan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.

Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own. And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they ca…

Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#149

Post by Llamamoe »

Chance-Device wrote: post #134

I get the feeling behind the anti-AI sentiment, I just disagree with the conclusions. There’s a lot of fear around what will happen with AI, not so much of extinction but rather of two things: fear of losing income, and arguably more importantly, fear of losing identity. People often are invested in what they do to the point that it’s who they are. That being replaced or eliminated might be a bigger psychological thr…

> However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.

Benefits come to those who have the means to access it, and wealth is a measure of the ability to direct and influence human effort and society.

How exactly do you propose that AI will serve the wellbeing of the worker/middle classes after they've been made obsolete by it?

Goodwill of the corporations working on them? Of their shareholders, well-known to always put welfare first and profit second? Government action increasingly directed by their lobbying?

> What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.

Sure. How? We've not done it with any other technological advances so far, and I don't see how shifting the power balance further away from the worker/middle class will help matters.

There's a reason why the era of techno-optimism has already faded as quickly as it's begun.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#150

Post by redox99 »

pizlonator wrote: post #56

Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Such situations usually correct themselves violently.

Do they in a world with humanoid robots that are harder better faster stronger?
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