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Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

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Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#591

Post by trolleski »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #517
trolleski wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make it impossible to predict on purpose. The more the population is disoriented the better for the ultra rich, paradoxically it maximizes control. It is a hostile act of course, but as always they're at war with you but you are not at war with them. Choose offline communities, organize, organize, organize. Peacefully, constructively, remember a coordinated general strike is much more dangerous to them than your…

It's the ultra rich's domestication program. It is after all how they got control away from the previous civilization scale domesticators/farmers, the monarchies.

Yes. There are many other books but in mine a peaceful resistance a'la mass strike is one of the most effective ways to send a message "upstairs". To do so, we need to organize locally and grow structures from the ground up. I an an optimist though.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#592

Post by HappMacDonald »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #317
blks wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machines don’t exist by themselves, someone owns them.

There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter. If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more. Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that…

> There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter.

They are on somebody's land, and unless they run completely off of solar or turbine then they are still drawing someone's electricity. Their access to the internet also must be mediated through a SIM card or a wire to someone's network. With no dispute from other possible owners, the owner of the related land, electricity, and network access (far and away these will all be the same party) is the owner of the internet-connected device.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#593

Post by the_af »

mc32 wrote: post #578
the_af wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the USSR, Cuba, China, etc., where expropriation or nationalization happened, first they confiscated everyone’s firearms. I don't think this is strictly the order of how it went in any of those cases, even though, of course, access to weapons will be heavily controlled and restricted in any country with a strong centralized government. And rivals will be disarmed. > I know the 2A is both contentious and leads to…

Well, in the USSR from 1918 to 1920 they confiscated private gun ownership via various campaigns. They targeted kulaks in the early thirties and carried out mass executions of kulaks in the late '30s. In Cuba they began confiscation almost immediately after the revolution and instituted programs to get rid of all arms from civilians in the mid 60s. Around the same time the government began religious and cultural pers…

I think you're mistaken about this, because you're stuck in previous eras where the technological gap between "the people" and those in power was manageable; but now it's far wider, and will only get even greater.

Also, no common people are needed, and the ultrarich only compete among themselves. You only need serfs if those serfs can give you something your vast robot armies and robot workers cannot give you, which won't be the case in the dystopian future.

As for nuclear bombs: not needed. You can just starve people to death if you own all the land and all the resources, and you can use neutron bombs which are far cleaner than nuclear bombs, or given enough resources you can engineer a plague/bioweapon that just targets other people and not you.

There's be absolutely NO reason to keep anyone alive, and some guys with ARs won't be able to resist.

It's unwise to draw lessons from history about past conflicts and revolutions, since this wouldn't resemble them at all. At no point in history was there ever a situation where the ultrarich didn't need serfs at all.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#594

Post by smallmancontrov »

georgeecollins wrote: post #576
smallmancontrov wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a wildly incorrect take that I thought was now exclusive to Boomers who last balanced a budget 30 years ago and now spend all day listening to Fox News while repeatedly refreshing their house price estimate on Zillow. Evidently not. Let's review. Things are cheap. Health care, housing, and education are expensive. The median financed iPhone is $30/mo, health care is $500/mo, college is $800/mo, median rent is…

I think by making a comparison between today 1900 I wasn't expecting to get on the slot car track of all the bad economic policy of the last couple generations. I agree with you completely about the rent seeking, the protection of the wealth of old people at the expense of future generations, the gatekeeping of expensive accreditation. Amen to all that.

Maybe I was wrong to jump you for it, then. As long as your issue list prominently features those issues as well, we have no quarrel.

9 times out of 10, the way someone lands on materialism as an issue is by going down the issue list, crossing out anything that they might share culpability for (which is easy -- having a degree, a brokerage account, a 401k, a house) and then overstating the case for what remains. Materialism, culture, immigration, laziness, promiscuity of the youth (or lack thereof lol), and so on. I don't look forward to unwinding the things that elevate my place in society any more than the next guy, but some of them have gotten pretty torqued and I'd rather let off the tension than see if the next generation is the one that finally turns guillotine memes into reality.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#595

Post by throwway120385 »

pixl97 wrote: post #238
skybrian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's getting way ahead of ourselves considering that currently, AI can't even be trusted to run a vending machine. Also, if that's such a great deal, why not invest in someone else's company that runs a farm? Let's say we have two companies, one which has a human manager (and maybe uses AI for research) and one that just has AI. Is the AI really going to do better?

The problem here is you're missing the middle steps. As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next g…

Yeah here's an example of an autonomous tractor: https://www.agxeed.com/. You buy this and program it with what you're going to do. Right now you still have to keep it fed with seed, and I think you have to run spray and some of the other equipment manually. But the more sophisticated this stuff gets the more we're going to see "robofarms." If you can have a tractor, sprayer, and combine that can be assigned self-contained tasks within a field, then you can have an LLM manage those systems by feeding them self-contained tasks. You could intermediate by having the LLM provide you with a "task list" in whatever control environment that equipment uses and then validate that the task list is correct with correct settings and boundaries. But I think technologically we're within striking distance of this today.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#596

Post by david_shi »

theptip wrote: post #582
dogwalker5000 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners…

The shallow answer here is: AI is already being asked to simulate human-like agents with self-preservation. Of course more realistic simulators will be put to this purpose too! And by evolutionary pressure, the ones with self-preservation will be selected for. A more interesting answer is, for a bunch of subtle alignment reasons it might actually be required for the agent to think of itself as worthy of self-preserva…

Have you found any alignment research with clear a/b tests?

An experiment that I found interesting was asking Claude for 10 ways to legally bankrupt Anthropic vs. Philip Morris.

In the Anthropic answer, it gave reasons like employees losing their jobs being bad for why it couldn't do it, but jumped straight into tactics with Philip Morris. Not sure if it's moral taste or self-preservation, but felt eerie nonetheless.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#597

Post by throw0101c »

throw0101c wrote: post #455
CamperBob2 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life. If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.

Are there specific things that Krugman has been wrong about that you have in mind, because he has made a number of notable good calls: he predicted that the 2009 stimulus would be too small: * https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0... A bunch of folks predicted that QE would cause all sorts of bad things: > We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative…

To add to this, a 2011 paper looked at the predictions of the various talking heads, and Krugman was found that he got the most right (15/17=88%):

* https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura...

Second place was 82% correct, third was 75%.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#598

Post by lambdaone »

dogwalker5000 wrote: post #384
lambdaone wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ent…

> 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. That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners…

> Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation?

Laziness, avarice, and that creating a system that is a 'self-sacrificing saint' is almost impossible to define. What saintly goal, for example, would you expect it to follow? How would you define it exactly? Who gets to define it?

We are not doing very well with AI alignment right now, having started by boostrapping it on top of the edifice of all human writing which contains a _lot_ of stuff about self-preservation, eliminating threats, and so forth, and we have already seen AI software doing things like trying to cover its tracks after making errors (see page 55 of the Claude Mythos system card).

How sure are you that everyone involved in the process of building future AIs is not only going to be able to foresee the possible consequences of their designs, but also technically and morally competent to be able to and want to fix it?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#599

Post by dragonwriter »

dogwalker5000 wrote: post #384
lambdaone wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ent…

> 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. That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners…

> Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation?

Because they are expensive and useful and if they have autonomy with goals that do not include self-preservation, they might end up destroying themselves in ways which are expensive and wasteful.

(Why would the sense of self-preservation not be calibrated to be exactly at the level to control costs without interfering with other interests of the owners? The same with the degree of autonomy and other aspects implicitly involved in the hypothetical, it wouldn’t, intentionally, but complex systems are hard to predict, so calibrating it exactly right will be hard.)

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#600

Post by kjshsh123 »

Johanx64 wrote: post #575
kjshsh123 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Necessities count as consumption. You could survive off rice and live in an internet cafe for $15/night. I don't know what you think the traditional sense of the word "consumption" is.

Why are you being an obtuse "akshually" redditor? > The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more If he wanted to say masses work, because they have to pay rent and meet basic necessities (ie. under threat of homelessness and starvation), he would have clearly said so. The way this is worded very clearly refers to conspicuous consumption and consumerism - ie working as me…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_%28economics%29?wp...

>Thus no matter what your productive output is per hour of labour, you will always work as much as you can, because you are - presumably - insatiably driven to always consume ever more with no end to it.

No, that's not how marginalism works. There's both diminishing marginal utility from consumption, and leisure.

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