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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#201

Post by paul7986 »

aabhay wrote: post #195
baron816 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized. The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI compan…

Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires

Without humans and our content, AI is irrelevant! For it to stay relevant I think it needs to pay every human for the daily content we all create (daily conversations, photos, videos) and choose to publish to web daily. Cloudflare only lets bots into our websites upon AI bots from all industries pay to enter our sites.

Overall if we want to keep this society economy we are use to with AI in the picture ... we need to thrive off of AI .. not just AI thriving off our backs and destroying the society we know.

Wrote about my idea how to get us all paid from the content we create daily last week on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...

Though we could all just go back to living off the land...

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#202

Post by JackMorgan »

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.

It's easy to point to high profile nepotites but I've known plenty of folks from all classes who have self-destructed. It's hardly limited to those with lives of leisure.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#203

Post by pixl97 »

AngryData wrote: post #183
whatever1 wrote: post #60

Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital? It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world. This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just…

I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in…

EMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off.

The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide.

Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#205

Post by ransom1538 »

baron816 wrote: post #126
whatever1 wrote: post #60

Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital? It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world. This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just…

Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized. The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI compan…

"Why is it a winner takes all situation?"

I have lawyer agent x10 better than yours in a civil matter. Guess who wins. What value is second best lawyer?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#206

Post by jameslk »

strken wrote: post #184
jameslk wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will corner finite resources and land. They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume? Investors don’t usually like to invest in companies that aren’t going to eventually earn any revenue either

Money is a mirage. You can't use dollars to hold land; you need force projection. Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them. You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase wit…

We can’t magically skip steps. It’s like South Park’s underwear gnomes. We’re missing steps in between and hand waving them away

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#207

Post by shimman »

qsera wrote: post #176
ares623 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea? If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free? > I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less. Taxes from what?

>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 the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too.

If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people."

It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions.

Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)?

People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.

[1] 65% https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-al...

[2] 82% https://www.ffyf.org/2026/01/28/new-national-poll-shows-stro...

[3] 60% https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/7/23863415/polls-support-un...

[4] 60% https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/11/democrats...

[5] 60 https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cwcp-job-guarantee-poll

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#208

Post by pixl97 »

jameslk wrote: post #171
whatever1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land. Now if we are lucky and the owners are humans with a good heart (and not AI), maybe there is some room for some people (aka provide authentic experiences)

> They will corner finite resources and land. They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume? Investors don’t usually like to invest in companies that aren’t going to eventually earn any revenue either

You mean like the Russian oligarchs that keep 'investing' in the war they are in... oh, you mean where they fall out a window when they don't.

The next thing is the idea of money really does break down once you get automation without people. If you have said automation and enough materials to get going you can start increasing your 'wealth' in things like factories/robots/data where the now unemployed stop having any means to make more money. Hence you'll start buying up properties from people that are going bankrupt.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#209

Post by akomtu »

Loughla wrote: post #151
marcus_holmes wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.

I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans. Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.

Minds keep humans as pets.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#210

Post by crabmusket »

qsera wrote: post #159
xyzzy123 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. 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. Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those. > The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to in…

>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.

> Isn't that the idea?

No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:

> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.

The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?

I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.

Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.

But that's still not "abundance for all".

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