61–70 of 117 posts
It is an interesting chain of thought. If we’re supposing that a superintelligence can be made, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should anthropomorphize ideas like “bored” onto it. Or greed. Perhaps it will just interact with us and produce us things because… that’s what it was trained to do, and anyway, it doesn’t have any motivations to do anything else.
Here's a potential solution: We accelerate capitalism (which AI is becoming synonymous with). The process described here will occur (it's probably inevitable anyway, as the essay's author would agree), giving us an economy of global capital completely decoupled from the desires of mankind. Then, man and machine can part ways; indeed, we'll have no choice on our end but to do this, because the machine won't need us. A…
> The government pays Raytheon for missiles, the money cascades down the economy through factories, aluminium smelters, mines, transport companies, all staffed by AIs buying and selling from each other. This seems too simplistic of a description of how money would work in such a world. Money is just a way to distribute your power to influence people. You never pay for machines or software. Think about buying anything…
A corporation that is fully staffed by AIs and only retains humans for legal reasons (as directors, for liability etc.) still needs money to coordinate. You need to pay for inputs, you need to pay to run the AIs, which consumes resources. Why would costs go to zero? The market is still a valuable tool for allocating resources even if no market actors are human.
That said, taking for granted some of its premisses, indeed saying that cost goes to zero in term of money is no big deal.
That is, money is purely human conventions. So if humans are put out of the loop, not only monetary cost goes to zero, the whole notion can skipped.
Of course, there is still some energy and material needed to run data centers, which do have costs in whatever unit one might measure them with.
A market is a place where human encounter to trade. Without humans, there is no market.
We do with mere local scalar currency because using vectorial computation taking into account everything that can be probed and measured into account integrated into a single whole is out of reach for human representation, even for the most intellectually gifted human person.
Money is a stupid unit, that tries to conflate everything in a single scalar and proves every single time that it's not able to deem what something is worth in all its intricated relationships. But somehow humans seem unable to leverage at scale on any tool that would be more sophisticated in all their socioeconomical exchanges. Once again, if one eliminate humans from the equation, or isolate as a ridiculously marginal factor, money and market become irrelevant.
All that said, once again, that stand on a very large set of "if"s.
Reads like a wild uneducated delusional libertarian fanfic. AI will make the all evil government at the top of the pyramid first enslave us all and then even come for the trillionaires (OH NO!) and then there is only the evil government left and then the AI even comes for the evil government people (OH YES!)! Sort of have to read it in the voice of a 12 year old. This is the kind of stuff I imagine they read to each…
If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, AI replacement within a few years is more likely than not. Elevator mechanics will probably do fine. Web designers, not so much. Expect elite overproduction, where there are too many educated people for the jobs that require such education. The US is there now, if you're a new college grad.
Now, there are several ways that can play out. The Gulf oil states have a huge jobs program for their own citizens. Most Saudis work for the government. Not doing the real work. 92% of construction workers in Saudi Arabia are not Saudis. This works out OK if the money is available.
Egypt used to work that way until the oil ran out. Egypt used to guarantee a government job to all college graduates. That had to end. Then youth unemployment hit 34%. Now it's down from the peak. [1] Not clear how that was achieved. Anyone know?
So that's the welfare state approach. Requires a rich government with an income stream that doesn't come from the lower classes.
Then there's the mass underclass result. Something like the favelas of Brazil. Lots of shacks, crowding, homelessness, and the usual urban dystopia movie world. That's what happens by default. Attempts to revolt result in a new boss, same as the old boss. "Workers of the world, unite!" doesn't work for non-workers. That's a stable situation.
Some combination of those two scenarios is the most likely outcome.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.1524.ZS?location...
Yeah, who am I going to trust, a few thousand years of history, or yet another blogger claiming that no, this time is different, a populist uprising would definitely not fail the 800th time because computers or something and we will all be pets for the AI overlord? I don’t follow this train of logic. AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. Some people will profit immensely, and society as a whole wi…
Once people become desperate enough, it will all fall apart. Money is a social construct, universally recognized, and the longer it exists, the more likely it is to continue existing. So far, many people haven’t even tried AI in any form other than chatbots. Agent-based applications are in the single digits compared to chatbot usage. Not much will change in this regard, because most people lack algorithmic or logical thinking (Hacker News is an echo chamber), so after the coming turbulent years, there will be a natural stabilization in AI usage.
By the way, can you imagine what Earth would look like if AI physically wiped us out—8.3 billion people over the course of a few months or years? How much biological material would that be?
The premise is a bit of a stretch to begin with, and the idea that people would not believe a fable transcript circa 2020 (as long as explained as 5 year future tech) is absurd. But even if I take that "AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at human level or better, and cheaper than humans" is true, the article seems to silently layer on "and can run autonomously, indefinitely", then "can also operate independen…
> the idea that people would not believe a fable transcript circa 2020 (as long as explained as 5 year future tech) is absurd. I’m certain I would not have believed a Fable transcript, or an Opus 4.8 or a GPT 5.5 one, for that matter. Is it so hard to imagine ourselves back then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A corporation that is fully staffed by AIs and only retains humans for legal reasons (as directors, for liability etc.) still needs money to coordinate. You need to pay for inputs, you need to pay to run the AIs, which consumes resources. Why would costs go to zero? The market is still a valuable tool for allocating resources even if no market actors are human.
To my mind the article is excellently written, but it comes with many bigger "if"s than the one it states. That said, taking for granted some of its premisses, indeed saying that cost goes to zero in term of money is no big deal. That is, money is purely human conventions. So if humans are put out of the loop, not only monetary cost goes to zero, the whole notion can skipped. Of course, there is still some energy and…
Yeah, probably I should have listed some more premises, i.e. that corporations maximize profits, the state maximizes power and security (I don't entirely buy the Realist framework, but if you want to predict how things work out "in the limit", rather than tomorrow, it seems alright?).
And naturally every "therefore" becomes weaker the further out into the future you try to predict.
Say we solve the pragmatic argument of our extinction, and our AIs view us, as Geoffrey Hinton likes to say, how a mother views her baby? Then we give up our control to them, and in return we are given lives of leisure, luxury, with minimal suffering, the end of disease, etc. Is this such a horrible scenario?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the idea that people would not believe a fable transcript circa 2020 (as long as explained as 5 year future tech) is absurd. I’m certain I would not have believed a Fable transcript, or an Opus 4.8 or a GPT 5.5 one, for that matter. Is it so hard to imagine ourselves back then?
Seriously. At that point it was a stuff of science fiction with the early models being on level of Markov chains. Today they are more helpful that the computer in Start Trek.
Yeah, who am I going to trust, a few thousand years of history, or yet another blogger claiming that no, this time is different, a populist uprising would definitely not fail the 800th time because computers or something and we will all be pets for the AI overlord? I don’t follow this train of logic. AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. Some people will profit immensely, and society as a whole wi…
I don’t believe the blog poster promotes a “popular uprising”, I only skimmed the article.
The blog poster anyway don’t understand that the “overclass” in their understanding is wrong. The “c-level” are obviously much richer than the “underclass”(=the labour commodity), but they are not necessarily capital owners.