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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

gmalandrakis.com

361–370 of 613 posts

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important question is, who has power in such an economy? In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction. Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies. I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a…

Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights. If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easi…

Indeed. An ownership class with killer robot armies living in luxury while they exterminate the rest of humanity would be quite possible in theory. After all, we've seen how slave-holders, the Nazis and many other malfeasants behaved in the past.

But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.

Not letting any of this happen would be a good idea. Really maybe don't build the Torment Nexus.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Everyone wants more 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 their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to…

The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means. Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since t…

Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people. You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters. BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company…

> Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piketty is just a marxist flailing around, backfilling data to fit his belief that communism is the solution for every problem. He's been spectacularly wrong in his predictions so far, for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.

Let's see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty > A visit to the Soviet Union in 1991 was enough to make him a firm "believe[r] in capitalism, private property and the market" Ok, that's what he says, but what does he want? Does he want to eliminate social classes (communism)? Eliminate private ownership of the means of production (socialism)? > His 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, relies on eco…

A visit to the USSR makes one a capitalist, a visit to the USA makes one a communist. Maybe they both suck?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#365

It’s an economic fallacy that a group of people would get “locked out” of the economy. If you and I are able to work, but can’t get jobs because robots do all the jobs, then we’re not just going to sit on our hands and starve. You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out. The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize…

You need land to do anything, even just to exist.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#366
The future I see is that the Rich won't need people and they will have the means to defend themselves.

In the last 1-2 years I see more and more people mentioning guillotines, but I think very soon that won't be an opion anymore.

The Rich will be able to leave the mainlands, protect themselves, and let everyone else be controlled by robot police, and suffer. Maybe if there's something the Rich absolutely need from the mainlands (what?) then they can let everyone else compete with each other to serve the Rich to ease their shitty life a little.

In the past such societies needed a lot of people to serve the Rich, and to oppress everyone else, and it wasn't that sustainable, revolutions could happen. Very soon the Rich won't need anyone in this system, they will own the means of production by robots (no strikes), and the means of oppression, also by robots.

This is what I see when I look ahead. (BTW the US picking fights when they are the bad guys will result US companies necessarily having to turn to private/robot armies to protect "their property".)

Maybe I am wrong and this won't happen even if we do nothing. However I'd feel safer if we started to take away the unimaginable riches from the Rich, and started to empower the government, which is at least in theory controlled by the majority of the citizens.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#367
Not only is it not impossible, it's precisely where it's heading.

I think even mass-market companies are going to thrive without customers. They don't need customers. The government will start handing out billion dollar contracts to these companies for doing almost nothing and they're going to focus on investing and the government money is just going to keep going round and round in circles between all the chosen companies.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#368
post #94

Man, I really freaking hate cloudflare bot checks. I can't even access this site, which I presume is just a few kilobytes of simple static HTML with some straightforward text content. I shouldn't have to work this hard to prove I'm human, it's exhausting

Flag the websites you can't access. If enough people flag them the moderators will take them down from the front page.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive

Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.

Many of them live in shacks made from wooden pallets and corrugated iron roofs instead. This is true across much of the Third World – Brazil, Haiti, South Africa and Indonesia all have them for example.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#370

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization. This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everyw…

>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment. You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on. You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters. You then realize, you still have all the part…

You missed the point entirely.

What fuels the economy, for now, is human work. Being a consumer simply means that you are heavily incentivised to take part (by working).

If machines can do the same or better, whoever owns them will end-up seeing unproductive humans as dangerous and wasteful bloat.

It won’t be a life of infinite leisure if you don’t own machines.

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