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You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

geohot.github.io

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Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#61
All this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord!

Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive.

This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living.

Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition.

As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#62

Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term. We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wag…

> Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power.

Markets and consumers would still exist, unless the AI is smart enough to solve the local knowledge problem via centralized computation.

A consumer doesn't have to be a person. It's an abstraction, and behind it sits any entity with capital. That includes non-human entities.

An example would be bidirectional trade between an AI company who mines resources, and an AI company who makes robots to mine resources.

Or if it's one big monopoly, they can have an internal market to facilitate competition and cooperation, like how Samsung operates.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#64

I couldn't disagree more. Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone. Yes, the transition can be painful and some people will lose out and face hard career changes. But overall, the multiplicative power of investment only increases, helping to make everything cheaper, and everyone richer. People focus too much on their own small part of experience - like Claude Code replaci…

> Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone.

I have several times seen the claim that the change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture lead to a lower quality of life.

But do we really know how to measure "quality of life"?

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#66
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It posits that the tools at their disposal will be far more powerful and wide reaching than just Gmail or even modern social networks. The good ol' AGI and then ASI singularity everyone likes to talk about. To be fair, it is possible.

It's vogue on HN to sometimes criticize critically so I want to try and be as constructive as possible: I work for one of these companies. I also have pay bills to pay. I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is. Frontier labs such as Google DeepMind are not just going to shutter their doors because 10% of the peons dropped their jobs. I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountabi…

> I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountability and safeguards for society.

You can't help but swing between "AGI is going to save us, praise the tech lords" and "AGI is going to kill us, tech lords have mercy" if you believe there is no counterpower to the tech lords.

"You, alone, leaving your job" is not a great way to counteract the tech lords (although at least it makes a point and show other people there is a problem.)

But there is the option to use your counterpowers (you know, legislators and all that ?) The tech lords are actively trying to avoid that (see the hilarious Musk vs Breton feud.)

It would be better if your system did not give money to power to choose lawmakers.

Maybe AI will make USA realize the definition of corruption and proper election funding laws.

But, if you don't want to join the underclass, maybe, just maybe, consider not picking tech lords as kings next time.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#67
post #28

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

And it isn't like people can't do still everything they could do yesterday. There are just more and better options. Economically AI is no particular threat to the median human and even knowledge workers are still going to have fine lives. Maybe not as knowledge workers. The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But r…

Right, you can still do everything you could yesterday. You can still hand-weave cloth and sell it if you want to, just like your ancestors could do three hundred years ago; you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread, because even though bread is cheaper than it used to be, your customer's next best alternative is an automatic loom, and those move very quickly these days.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#68

Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term. We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wag…

Prices don't represent anything absolute, they just capture the cost of reallocating a marginal number of goods to produce this particular thing instead of some other thing.

If there is so much of something that everyone can have one, effectively prices would drop until everyone could afford one. Like how even homeless people can afford air, because there is so much of it that there is no point charging people for access. Or YouTube they just let anyone watch it because it is so cheap to push bytes out over the internet.

Removing humans from the production process would, in theory, be similar. There is a certain amount that gets produced and we come up with some way to allocate it. Prices and wages adjust to that reality.

> We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built...

That just so story is probably a lie. The math wouldn't work out and Ford would know it - he was just competing with other companies for labour. It is like programmers getting paid huge amounts - it isn't because the companies think it helps them because of some vague circular logic about what happens in the broader market. They just need the skills, now.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#69
An economics counter argument:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-...

Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#70
George Hotz’s post-capitalist decoherence wasn’t in my 2026 bingo card. I wonder if he came up with this view before or after working for big tech in different capacities and using Gmail.

He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.

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