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Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

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Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#211

Post by BobaFloutist »

emehex wrote: post #202
Aurornis wrote: post #36

> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than d…

I don't understand UBI. Let's say a burger costs $10. Then UBI is implemented. But not just like $1K/month UBI... $1M/year UBI... for everyone! There's no way that the burger is still $10 now. Right? Won't the economy just soak up all the extra UBI money? So a burger will cost $1000 in world where everyone gets $1M/year? And like $20 when everyone gets $1K/month? Isn't it all just a wash?

I think of it as closer to $500/month, with supply-side government subsidies of food and housing, and then increasing taxes such that the mean person nets 0$.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#212

Post by krupan »

ryeights wrote: post #165
krupan wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. The AI psychosis that has people actually believing this stuff is far scarier to me than what might maybe possibly could happen if AI somehow actually performs to the level that the people selling it say it will.

The antidote to AI psychosis is not denial. We owe it to ourselves to be humble and consider the possibility that LLM technology leads to general intelligence. The capabilities of coding agents today are certainly outside my wildest imagination circa GPT-3 launch in 2020.

For many of us the release of GPT-3 appeared like a huge step function, a gigantic leap forward, but the fact is, it wasn't that huge. We've been researching computers and AI for around 70 years now. We had productive "machine learning" and pattern completion for a good what, 10 or 15 years before GPT-3 was released. Your phone could auto complete. Computers could win at chess. I worked on working autonomous flying drones back in 2008. In 2020 I joined an autonomous car company that had been slowly grinding for 10 years beforeI joined. The growth is there but not at the blinding rate you think.

One thing I have seen no evidence of is AI being smarter than the smartest humans. It's still just a search engine (with an impressive human language UI) of existing human knowledge. It cannot do anything it has not been trained on.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#213

Post by phainopepla2 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #190
phainopepla2 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the rich have control over the communication networks and over highly intelligent AI systems then it follows that they would use that control to prevent the masses from organizing into a cohesive political unit, and keep them fighting amongst each other for scraps. This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the…

People will just… form communities and communicate offline?

One might think so, but looking at the trajectory of human communities and communication under current technologies, I'm guessing that it will be a niche-enough phenomenon that the surveillance state (or corporation) will easily be able to crush any IRL dissent.

People are already struggling to form offline communities as easily as was done in the past, I can only imagine it will get harder as more AI-powered entertainment seeps into the cracks of the social mind.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#214

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Brendinooo wrote: post #52
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you have to do is look at the state of the world today to see this is the endgame. Huge swaths of humanity live on basically subsistence level agriculture, and it's not like we're all sending UBI to them. The top .001% can see the rest of us fall a lot further before they have to worry about who will buy their products.

This is such an odd take, when the percent of the world doing subsistence farming has never been lower at any point in human history, and a mixture of capitalism and technological innovation is the primary driver of that.

To clarify, I'm not arguing that capitalism is inherently bad or that it hasn't pulled huge swaths of people out of poverty.

What I'm pushing back against (which I often see in discussions of UBI) is that powerful people will give out free money just out of the goodness of their heart or because "they'll need people to buy their products". We're transitioning out of an era where labor has held (historically) a lot of power, but now technology is heading us down a path where capital will hold the vast majority of the cards. And a lot of the discussion around stuff like UBI just feels like hopium to me: "Surely with an abundance of riches we won't just let people die in the street!" But yes, we actually do let people die in the street already, especially if they're kinda far away.

The powers behind tech and AI are not going to give up that power willingly, or from the good of their hearts.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#215

Post by amanaplanacanal »

metalliqaz wrote: post #119

Farmers won't be fired. AI won't replace plumbers. Hairstylists, chefs, landscapers, escorts, nurses, fisherman, etc. There are and will be plenty of people with jobs that AI can't do.

It does sound like the end of the middle class though.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#216

Post by maxerickson »

emehex wrote: post #202
Aurornis wrote: post #36

> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than d…

I don't understand UBI. Let's say a burger costs $10. Then UBI is implemented. But not just like $1K/month UBI... $1M/year UBI... for everyone! There's no way that the burger is still $10 now. Right? Won't the economy just soak up all the extra UBI money? So a burger will cost $1000 in world where everyone gets $1M/year? And like $20 when everyone gets $1K/month? Isn't it all just a wash?

Markets have a bid and an ask.

If you have robust supply and real competition, the ask should trend towards cost plus some profit, not whatever maximum price people will pay out of desperation.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#217

Post by Apocryphon »

EGreg wrote: post #208
slopinthebag wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.

No. Bitcoin is one coin for everyone. The attempts to create "colored coins" back in 2013 fell flat, then it became a "store of value", and punted on being a "peer to peer payment system". https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin , and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised abou…

Is it something like Great Depression scrip?

https://www.depressionscrip.com

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#218

Post by closeparen »

Average American workers provide in-person services that don't scale and can't get much leverage from technology. Retail, hospitality, construction, care work, etc. They have not seen the kind of wage growth that accrued to the laptop class, but for the same reasons they are not as vulnerable. Probably we will end up alongside them. Plenty of demand growth coming in the elder-care sector.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#219

Post by amanaplanacanal »

EGreg wrote: post #208
slopinthebag wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.

No. Bitcoin is one coin for everyone. The attempts to create "colored coins" back in 2013 fell flat, then it became a "store of value", and punted on being a "peer to peer payment system". https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin , and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised abou…

There used to be a ton of competing currencies in the US. Banks regularly went bankrupt taking everybody's savings with them. Your suggestion doesn't really sound like anything new.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#220

Post by lz400 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #100

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but here goes... The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy. It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital? For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumpt…

I feel there are like 50 load bearing assumptions in this piece of fiction that are dubious at best, definitely speculation. When you put all of them together and chain them in a product of probabilities it becomes tech bro wish fulfilling fantasy. But as usual this is expressed with total confidence and inevitability. This is a perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with rationalists, TPOT, etc. IMHO.

I'll just suggest that you track your predictions and "update your priors" once they start domino falling.

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