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The dead economy theory

owenmcgrann.com

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Re: The dead economy theory

#491

Post by bonoboTP »

ekidd wrote: post #127
alex_young wrote: post #53

Why is this time different? Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder…

> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock,…

I won't deny the comfort value of yachts and private jets, but I doubt that this material comfort is the main value proposition of these things. Instead, it's status symbols, status above slightly less rich people. The yachts are in a way an epiphenomenon of intra-elite social competition, and if you don't manage your network well, you can easily lose out in the next generation. Investment into social relations is what really matters. And when you're generationally rich, you typically think about making impressive impacts over society, the kind that impresses your social circle, based 9n their philosophy, which typically happens to be self serving but with just enough other stuff to not seem to crass. Taste is the highest status thing,not intelligence, not skill.

It's hard to extrapolate. What will be the goals and motivations of this super elite? Let's say all of us normal people just die off either starving or just by not reproducing any more, just watching VR, sedated with subsidized happiness drugs. Let's just suppose that. What then? Will the rich keep reproducing? What will limit their reproduction if material abundance is there? Will the elite families keep each other in check not to over-reproduce? Or will these people repopulate the earth, each living on yachts and in comfort, living an elite life? Surely that will bump up against all kinds of limits, similar to what the current earth-populating humans are facing. You can't have a super yacht per person to an unlimited amount of millions of people. At some point they will have to willingly not reproduce despite having all access to robot care, robots watching your every whim etc. I don't see any stable endpoint.

Re: The dead economy theory

#492

Post by ranyume »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #433
wcfrobert wrote: post #299

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…

>It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future? I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theor…

What does outcompete economically mean and why would it matter? Or do you mean society A dominates in some form society B? This has already happened in history and is the essence of capitalism. If you want to overcome this situation you need to replace capitalism globally.

Re: The dead economy theory

#493

Post by mschuster91 »

TimByte wrote: post #386
graemep wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work.

What is the next large labour-absorbing sector supposed to be?

If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.

Re: The dead economy theory

#494

Post by thisisit »

Animats wrote: post #248

India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily. This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots…

You have to look at the population split between urban/rural. In China it is 67/33 and India it is completely reversed at 30/70. And agri continues to be the number one occupation.

Additionally, lack of opportunities is also a problem. India has been focused on services and trailed behind on industrialisation. The current government has been pushing for more industrialisation but they are behind in the curve.

Re: The dead economy theory

#495

Post by IncreasePosts »

pdonis wrote: post #483
spongebobstoes wrote: post #15

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money we can do…

> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes. But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is…

What do tech giants have to do with food production, clothing, medicine, housing?

Re: The dead economy theory

#496

Post by bonoboTP »

scarmig wrote: post #171
coffeemug wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.

"Forcing redistribution" doesn't always happen. Typically, redistribution happens when negotiating leverage has increased such that the beneficiaries of any redistribution can make it more painful to not redistribute than to redistribute. I.e. they have labor power, which can be converted to force if necessary. In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wieldin…

It doesn't have to be all that dramatic. Just ensure that they don't reproduce at replacement level. In fact that's already happening. Crank it up a bit more, make things South Korea++ and it's just not a problem. If nobody shows up in the next generations out of whatever reasons, there's no risk of some kind of uprising you'd have to crush with a robot army. Just wait, push cultural messaging that encourages individualism and implicit antinatalism and it will seem perfectly humane. Legacy humans will simply go away, without any major incident.

Re: The dead economy theory

#497

Post by hunterpayne »

thechao wrote: post #413
omcgrann wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it. Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's…

The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.

Or visa-versa. Somehow I feel like this gets missed when discussing this topic. And consider which direction do you think this is likely going to go? Betting on the "AI-owning capital class" seems a bit delusional to me. Does money or gold have much value in Zombie apocalypse shows? How much are bullets worth in those shows? Please, for the love of god, think this through.

Re: The dead economy theory

#498

Post by bonoboTP »

idiotsecant wrote: post #168
coffeemug wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.

No they won't, not if they have just enough bread and circuses and someone below them to hate. Boil the frog slowly enough and it'll work out just fine for the capital class.

Bread, circus, strife, anger, hopelessness, antinatalist cultural products and it doesn't need anything aggressive or spectacular. People will just cease to reproduce seemingly of their own will. South Korea to the nth power.

Re: The dead economy theory

#499

Post by monknomo »

forgetfulness wrote: post #284
some_random wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek isn't real life, when human labor stops being valuable the humans who's labor was previously vital will be at best left to rot in squalor.

For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a…

If AI only blows away programming, sure you are probably right. If AI blows away white collar labor, which is at least half of jobs, then yeah something would give way.

Re: The dead economy theory

#500

Post by ipdashc »

This isn't a bad article by any means, but if I'm being honest, it's kind of embodying the "has philosophy ever actually answered any question" meme.

The author spends several pages complaining about how the evil masterminds behind AI haven't actually thought through what it'll do to society, haven't proposed any real way to handle its impacts. And then proceeds to not propose any real ways to handle its impacts.

Making fun of billionaires for being fake philosophers is all well and good, but the technology is here, like it or not. So is the proposal to get rid of it? Butlerian Jihad? If it is, just say that. That's genuinely fine! But as is, no such action is actually proposed.

I'm not expecting random bloggers to just solve what might be the defining issue of our generation, but come on, I'm really starting to get tired of this format of post that doesn't even try, while simultaneously complaining about and making fun of any existing "solutions". Yeah, I don't think UBI or the "leisure economy" is going to happen soon either, and if it does it's certainly got all the flaws that were mentioned, but it's better than literally nothing.

Can we at least admit that it's a genuinely hard problem, and beyond either managing to pull off the aforementioned worldwide Butlerian Jihad, or getting lucky and it turns out AI actually sucks and can't replace anyone's job, we don't really have any good solutions for it? Or would that be too uncomfortably close to admitting that between the "fake philosopher" tech bro bloggers and the ones that, I guess, did philosophy in undergrad, neither have any workable solutions to the problem?

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