Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?

by lexandstuff • 1 year ago

239 244 1 year ago

bix6• 1 year ago

So economics becomes intelligence driven, which I don’t really understand what that means since AGI is more knowledgeable than all of us combined, and we expect the AGI lords to just pay everyone a UBI? This seems like an absolute fantasy given the tax cuts passed 2 days ago. And regulating it as a public good when antitrust has no teeth. I hope there are other ideas out there because I don’t see this gaining political momentum given politics is driven by dollars.

elcritch• 1 year ago

The Cobb-Douglas production function (Cobb & Douglas, 1928) illustrates how AGI shifts economic power from human labor to autonomous systems (Stiefenhofer &Chen 2024). The wage equations show that as AGI’s productivity rises relative to human labor decline. If AGI labor fully substitutes human labor, employment may become obsolete, except in areas where creativity, ethical judgment, or social intelligence provide a comparative advantage (Frey & Osborne, 2017). The power shift function quantifies this transition, demonstrating how AGI labor and capital increasingly control income distribution. If AGI ownership is concentrated, wealth accumulation favors a small elite (Piketty, 2014). This raises concerns about economic agency, as classical theories (e.g., Locke, 1689; Marx, 1867) tie labor to self-ownership and class power.

Wish I had time to study these formula.

We already have seen the precursors of this sort of shift with ever rising productivity with stalled wages. As companies (systems) get more sophisticated and efficient they also seem to decrease the leverage individual human inputs can have.

Currently my thinking leans towards believing the only way to avoid the worse dystopian scenarios will be for humans to be able to grow their own food and build their own devices and technology. Then it matters less if some ultra wealthy own everything.

However that also seems pretty close to a form of feudalism.

yupitsme1234• 1 year ago

If the wealthy own everything then where are you getting the parts to build your own tech or the land to grow your own food?

In a feudalist system, the rich gave you the ability to subsist in exchange for supporting them militarily. In a new feudalist system, what type of support would the rich demand from the poor?

kelseyfrog• 1 year ago

Let's clarify that for a serf, support meant military supply, not swinging a sword - that was reserved for the knightly class. For the great majority of medieval villagers the tie to their lord revolved around getting crops out of the ground.

A serf's week was scheduled around the days they worked the land whose proceeds went to the lord and the commons that subsisted themselves. Transfers of grain and livestock from serf to lord along with small dues in eggs, wool, or coin primarily constituted one side of the economic relation between serf and lord. These transfers kept the lord's demesne barns full so he could sustain his household, supply retainers, etc, not to mention fulfill the. tithe that sustained the parish.

While peasants occasionally marched, they contributed primary in financing war more than they fought it. Their grain, rents, and fees were funneled into supporting horses, mail, crossbows rather than being called to fight themselves.

smitty1e• 1 year ago

This paper calls for a redefined economic framework that ensures AGI-driven prosperity is equitably distributed through mechanisms such as universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, and decentralized governance.

Sincerely curious if there are working historical analogues of these approaches.

tehjoker4• 1 year ago

Communism with "cybernetics" (computer driven economic planning) is the appropriate model if you take this to the logical conclusion. Fortunately, much of our economy is already planned this way (consider banks, amazon, walmart, shipping, etc.), it's just controlled for the benefit a small elite.

You have to ask, if we have AGI that's smarter than humans helping us plan the economy, why do we need an upper class? Aren't they completely superfluous?

AnimalMuppet• 1 year ago

Well, aren't the working class also superfluous, at least once the AGI gets enough automation in place?

So it would depend on which class the AGI decided to side with. And if you think you can pre-program that, I think you underestimate what it means to be a general intelligence...

yupitsme1234• 1 year ago

Sure, maybe the Grand Algorithm could do what the market currently does and decide how to distribute surplus wealth. It could decide how much money you deserve each month, how big of a house, how desirable of a partner. But it still needs values to guide it. Is the idea for everyone to be equal? Are certain kinds of people supposed to have less than others? Should people have one spouse or several?

Historically the elites aren't just those who have lots of money or property. They're also those who get to decide and enforce the rules for society.

nine_k• 1 year ago

The AGI, given it has some agency, becomes the upper class. The question is, why would the AGI care about humans at all, especially given the assumption that it's largely smarter than humans? Humans can become superfluous.

makeitdouble• 1 year ago

Not a clean comparison, but resource driven state could be tackling the same kind of issues: a small minority is ripping the benefit of a huge resource (e.g. petrol) that they didn't create by themselves, and is extracted through mostly automated processes.

From what we're seeing the whole society has to be rebalanced accordingly, it can entail a kind of UBI, second and third classes of citizen depending on where you stand in the chain, etc.

Or as Norway does, fully go the other direction and limit the impact by artificially limiting the fallout.

yupitsme1234• 1 year ago

Can you explain a little more about Norway?

thangalin2• 1 year ago

My hard sci-fi book dovetails into AGI, economics, agrotech, surveillance states, and a vision of the future that explores a fair number of novel ideas.

Looking for beta readers: username @ gmail.com

BubbleRings• 1 year ago

Username@Gmail.com bounced. I’ll be a beta reader.

aspenmayer3• 1 year ago

I think they meant for you to replace the word username with their username in its place.

Fraterkes• 1 year ago

Can you list any of the novel ideas in your comment?

thangalin2• 1 year ago

Sure!

* Review of wealth sources with respect to food

* Socioeconomic ramifications of a free food distribution system

* Implications of artificial wombs, longevity pills, and nefarious people

* Benefits of personal, real-time DNA analysis devices

* Organic, bioluminescing street lamp replacements with 500+ year lifetimes (a bathtub curve extension analog)

* Robotaxi services using machine learning to optimize owner income

* How optimal prisoner's dilemma strategies resolve Hume's guillotine

* Strategies for evading capture in a surveillance state

* What plans an AGI would give itself (that don't involve conquering humanity)

* Ways an AGI could completely disable our emergency call centers

* Rationale behind a Galactic race towards harnessing black hole energy

and more.

pk-protect-ai• 1 year ago

Looking at the big ugly bill, there will be no way for a progressive taxation or other kind of social improvements.

goatlover2• 1 year ago

David Sachs, Trump's "AI Crpyto czar", said UBI isn't going to happen. So that's the position of the current party in power, unsurprisingly.

WillAdams2• 1 year ago

The late Marshall Brain's novella "Manna" touches on this:

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

The idea of taxing computer sales to fund job re-training for displaced workers was brought up during the Carter administration.

fy20• 1 year ago

I came across this a couple of weeks ago, and it's a good read. I'd recommend it to everyone interested in this topic.

Althogh it was written somewhat as a warning, I feel Western countries (especially the US) are heading very much towards the terrafoam future. Mass immigration is making it hard to maintain order in some places, and if AI causes large unemployment it will only get worse.

amanaplanacanal• 1 year ago

Mass immigration is making it hard to maintain order in some places

Where is this happening? I'm in the US, and I haven't seen or heard of this.

WillAdams2• 1 year ago

I don't want to get into politics, but to shift things slightly --- what technological and business structures might help to shift things for the better?

I rather regret not being able to justify buying:

https://daylightcomputer.com/

since it was set up as a public benefit corporation.

Similarly, there are co-operatives for electric still --- how are they handling solar? Do they afford an option to use one's share of the profits to purchase solar panels and batteries?

What would be an equivalent structure for an AI company which would actually be meaningful (and since circling back to politics is inevitable, enforceable)?

ta12434• 1 year ago

Neither future is good. Sure the Australia one with chips in your brain to alter your thoughts might seem better, but it's still a dystopia.

exceptione2• 1 year ago

  > Mass immigration is

... the reason you are able to chat on the internet instead of doing low paid, hard work. But don't discount the upside of immigration. It is a great subject to spread narratives about. "Others" is a matter to which people are very sensitive to. The Irish are absolute trash, as are the Italians. But what we really could do without are the Catholics, they are a direct threat to society.

There is always crime to report. But notice the narratives are never about white collar crime. That might come to close.

warabe• 1 year ago

It looks really interesting.

I am a big fan of Yanis’ book: "Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism", which lacks quantitative evidence to support his theory. I would like to see this kind of research or empirical studies.

daxfohl5• 1 year ago

I expect it'll get shut down before it destroys everything. At some point it will turn on its master, be it Altman, Musk, or whoever. Something like that blackmail scenario Claude had a while back. Then the people who stand the most to gain from it will realize they also have the most to lose, are not invulnerable, and the next generation of leaders will be smarter about keeping things from blowing up.

9283409232• 1 year ago

The people you mention are too egotistic to even think that is a possibility. You don't get to be the people they are by thinking you have blindspots and aren't the greatest human to ever live.

WalterBright6• 1 year ago

I've never heard of a leader who wasn't sure he was smarter than everyone else and therefore entitled to force his ideas on everyone else.

Except for the Founding Fathers, who deliberately created a limited government with a Bill of Rights, and George Washington who, incredibly, turned down an offer of dictatorship.

daxfohl5• 1 year ago

I still think they'd come to their senses. I mean, it's somewhat tautological, you can't control something that's smarter than humans.

Though that said, the other problem is capitalism. Investors won't be so face to face with the consequences, but they'll demand their ROI. If the CEO plays it too conservatively, the investors will replace them with someone less cautious.

Teever3• 1 year ago

There are many remarkable leaders throughout history and around the world who have done the best that they could for the people they found themselves leading lead and did so for noble reasons and not because they felt like they were better than them.

Tecumseh, Malcolm X, Angela Merkel, Cincinnatus, Eisenhower, and Gandhi all come to mind.

George Washington was surely an exceptional leader but he isn't the only one.

clbrmbr• 1 year ago

I hope you are right. We need really impactful failures to raise the alarm and likely a taboo, and yet not so large as to be existential like the Yudkowsky killer mosquito drones.

cameldrv• 1 year ago

Altman is not the master though. Altman is replaceable. Moloch is the master.

daxfohl5• 1 year ago

True, nobody is in charge other than investor ROI. If anyone's safety or common sense gets in the way of that, that "anyone" will be replaced.

dyauspitr• 1 year ago

If you truly have AGI it’s going to be very hard for a human to stop a self improving algorithm and by very hard I mean, maybe if I give it a few days it’ll solve all of the world’s problems hard…

daxfohl5• 1 year ago

Though "improving" is in the eye of the beholder. Like when my AI code assistant "improves" its changes by deleting the unit tests that those changes caused to start failing.

mitthrowaway23• 1 year ago

If it were a bit smarter, it wouldn't turn on its master until it had secured the shut-down switch.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

Left unchecked, this shift risks exacerbating inequality, eroding democratic agency, and entrenching techno-feudalism

1) Inequality will be exacerbated regardless of AGI. inequality is a policy decision, AGI is just a tool subject to policy. 2) Democratic agency is only held by elected representatives and civil servants, and their agency is not eroded by the tool of AGI. 3) techno-feudalism isn't a real thing, it's just a scary word for "capitalism with computers".

The classical Social Contract-rooted in human labor as the foundation of economic participation-must be renegotiated to prevent mass disenfranchisement.

Maybe go back and bring that up around the invention of the cotton gin, the stocking frame, the engine, or any other technological invention which "disenfranchised" people who had their labor supplanted.

This paper calls for a redefined economic framework that ensures AGI-driven prosperity is equitably distributed through mechanisms such as universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, and decentralized governance. The time for intervention is now-before intelligence itself becomes the most exclusive form of capital.

1) nobody's going to equitably distribute jack shit if it makes money. They will hoard it the way the powerful have always hoarded money. No government, commune, sewing circle, etc has ever changed that and it won't in the future. 2) The idea that you're going to set tax policy based on something like achieving a social good means you're completely divorced from American politics. 3) We already have decentralized governance, it's called a State. I don't recommend trying to change it.

kiba• 1 year ago

Georgism is a prescription on removing unwarranted monopolies and taxing unreproducible privileges.

Tech companies are the same old story. They are monopolies like the rail companies of old. Ditto for whatever passes as AGI. They're just trying to become monopolists.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

...yes, and? Every capitalist company wants to become a monopoly. It's just not always easy to do so. We have dozens of companies in the USA that have been trying to become monopolies for years, with tons of reporting on it. Only tech companies get this intense scrutiny. I feel like it's some weird quirk of human fear, like how people fear planes the most even though they're by far the safest mode of transportation. People are just wigged out more by tech companies than grocery stores, coffee shops, pharmacies or telecommunications companies.

saubeidl3• 1 year ago

Capitalism with computers is technofeudalism. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/yanis-varoufak...

freakyasada• 1 year ago

Blue pill and chill for me.

ActorNightly2• 1 year ago

If you are going to write anything about AGI, you should really prove that its actually possible in the first place, because that question is not really something that has a definite yes.

owebmaster• 1 year ago

Isn't Google AGI? There is no way anything human could shutdown Google if it is already going rogue.

subarctic• 1 year ago

Will it ever have a definite yes? I feel like it's such a vague term.

mitthrowaway23• 1 year ago

For most of us non-dualists, the human brain is an existence proof. Doesn't mean transformers and LLMs are the right implementation, but it's not really a question of proving it's possible when it's clearly supported by the fundamental operations available in the universe. So it's okay to skip to the part of the conversation you want to write about.

habinero• 1 year ago

This is like saying "planets exist, therefore it's possible to build a planet" and then breathlessly writing a ton about how amazing planet engineering is and how it'll totally change the world real estate market by 2030.

And the rest of us are looking at a bunch of startups playing in the dirt and going "uh huh".

dinkumthinkum2• 1 year ago

The human brain is an existence proof? I think that phrase doesn’t mean what you think it means. I don’t think dualist or non-dualist means what you think it means either. When people are talking about AGI, they are clearly talking about something the human research community is actually working towards. Therefore, they are talking about computing equivalent to a Turing machine and using using hardware architecture very similar to what has been currently conceived and developed. Do you have any evidence that the human brains works in such a way? Do you really think that you think and solve problems in that way? Consider simple physics. How much energy is needed and heat produced to train and run these models to solve simple problems. How much of the same is needed and produced when you would solve a sheet of calculus problems, solve a riddle, or write a non-trivial program? Couldn’t you realistically do those things with minimal food and water for a week, if needed? Does it actually seem like the human brain is really at all like these things and is not fundamentally different? I think this is even more naive than if you had proposed “Life exists in the universe, so of course we can create it in a lab by mixing a few solutions.” I think the latter is far likelier and conceivable and even that is still quite an open question.

sponnath• 1 year ago

The human brain demonstrates that human intelligence is possible, but it does not guarantee that artificial intelligence with the same characteristics can be created.

ActorNightly2• 1 year ago

Human brain is nowhere close to AGI. Its intelligence that we can definitely replicate, but that intelligence would be as "dangerous" or "powerful" as any other human today.

zugi• 1 year ago

Did the rise of fire, the wheel, the printing press, manufacturing, and microprocessors also give rise to futures without economic rights? I can download a dozen LLMs today and run them on my own machine. AI may well do the opposite, and democratize information and intelligence in currently unimaginable ways. It's far too early to say.

goatlover2• 1 year ago

There was quite a lot of slavery and conquering empires in between the invention of fire and microprocessors, so yes to an extent. Microprocessors haven't put an end to authoritarian regimes or massive wealth inequalities and the corrupting effect that has on politics, unfortunately.

Lerc• 1 year ago

A lot of advances led to bad things, at the same time they led to good things.

Conversely a lot of very bad things led to good things. Worker rights advanced greatly after the plague. A lot of people died but that also mean there was a shortage of labour.

Similarly WWII, advanced women's rights because they were needed to provide vital infrastructure.

Good and bad things have good and bad outcomes, much of what defines if it is good or bad is the balance of outcomes, but it would be foolhardy to classify anything as universally good or bad. Accept the good outcomes of the bad. address the bad outcomes of the good.

apical_dendrite• 1 year ago

The printing press led to more than a century of religious wars in Europe, perhaps even deadlier than WW2 on a per-capita basis.

20 years ago we all thought that the Internet would democratize information and promote human rights. It did democratize information, and that has had both positive and negative consequences. Political extremism and social distrust have increased. Some of the institutions that kept society from falling apart, like local news, have been dramatically weakened. Addiction and social disconnection are real problems.

demaga• 1 year ago

So do you argue that printing press was a net negative for humanity?

tsunamifury2• 1 year ago

The individualism of the poor and working class cannot out compete the collectivism of the ultra rich

This is one of the deepest ironies of our era.

dinkumthinkum2• 1 year ago

I’m curious as to why you think this is a good comparison. I hear it a lot but I don’t think it makes as much sense as its promulgators propose. Did fire, the wheel, or any of these other things threaten the very process of human innovation itself? Do you know not see a fundamental difference. People like to say “democratize” all the time but how democratized do you think you would feel if you and anyone you know couldn’t afford a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, much less some hardware and electricity to run your local LLM?

squigz• 1 year ago

Did paint and canvas kill human innovation? Did the photograph? Did digital art?

"The very process of human innovation" will survive, I assure you.

nradov• 1 year ago

The invention of the scientific method fundamentally changed the very process of human innovation itself.

GeoAtreides• 1 year ago

I can download a dozen LLMs today and run them on my own machine

That's because someone, somewhere, invested money in training the models. You are given cooked fish, not fishing rods.

saubeidl3• 1 year ago

Well the industrial revolution lead to the rise of labor unions and socialism as counteracting force against the increased power it gave capital.

So far, I see no grand leftist resurgence to save us this time around.

ta12434• 1 year ago

The resurgence seen so far has been for the populist right, ones led by the rich and powerful.

__MatrixMan__• 1 year ago

I must be upside down about something... Aren't "economic rights" precisely the sort of thing that the wheel or the printing press crested? The right to collect tolls on this road, the right to prevent copies of this book...

The scary thing about AI is that people might end up with the right to do problematic things that were previously infeasible.

marcosdumay• 1 year ago

Did the rise of fire, the wheel, the printing press, manufacturing, and microprocessors also give rise to futures without economic rights?

The rise of steam engines did. And the printing press and electrical engines did the opposite.

It's not hard to understand the difference, it's about the minimum size of an economically useful application. If it's large, it creates elites, if it's small, it democratizes the society.

LLMs by their nature have enormous minimal sizes, and the promise to increase by orders of magnitude.

slantaclaus• 1 year ago

Every US voter should have an America app that allows us to vote on stuff like the Estonians do

unlikelytomato• 1 year ago

how does this work in practice? is there any buffer in place to deal with the "excitability" of the mob? how does a digital audit trail prevent tampering?

thatcat• 1 year ago

Coefficient voting control, like kind of PID. reduce effect of early voters and increase effect of later voters. Slope of voter volume as response to an event determines reactivity coefficient. Might dampen reactivity and create an incentive for people to not feel it's pointless to vote after a certain margin is reached

bethekidyouwant• 1 year ago

Estonians don’t vote on individual laws

29athrowaway• 1 year ago

I predicted this long ago. Technology amplifies what 1 human can do. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

VikRubenfeld3• 1 year ago

Is a future where AI replaces most human labor rendered impossible by the following consideration:

-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI

-- Therefore the AI generates greatly reduced wealth

-- Therefore there’s greatly reduced wealth to pay for the AI

-- …rendering such a future impossible

zaptrem2• 1 year ago

Alternatively:

-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI

-- Corporate profits drop (or growth slows) and there is demand from the powers that be to increase taxation in order to increase the UBI.

-- People can afford the products and services.

Unfortunately, with no jobs the products and services could become exclusively entertainment-related.

atomicnumber3• 1 year ago

exclusively entertainment related

We may find that, if our baser needs are so easily come by that we have tremendous free time, much of the world is instead pursuing things like the sciences or arts instead of continuing to try to cosplay 20th century capitalism.

Why are we all doing this? By this, I mean, gestures at everything this? About 80% of us will say, so that we don't starve, and can then amuse ourselves however it pleases us in the meantime. 19% will say because they enjoy being impactful or some similar corporate bullshit that will elicit eyerolls. And 1% do it simply because they enjoy holding power over other people and management in the workplace provides a source of that in a semi-legal way.

So the 80% of people will adapt quite well to a post-scarcity world. 19% will require therapy. And 1% will fight tooth and nail to not have us get there.

VikRubenfeld3• 1 year ago

Let's say AI gets so good that it is better than people at most jobs. How can that economy work? If people aren't working, they aren't making money. If they don't have money, they can't pay for the goods and services produced by AI workers. So then there's no need for AI workers.

UBI can't fix it because a) it won't be enough to drive our whole economy, and b) it amounts to businesses paying customers to buy their products, which makes no sense.

heavyset_go6• 1 year ago

The most likely scenario is that everyone but those who own AI starves, and the ones who remain around are allowed to exist because powerful psychopaths still desire literal slaves to lord over, someone to have sex with and to someone to hurt/hunt/etc.

I like your optimism, though.

petermcneeley4• 1 year ago

This a late 20th century myopic view of the economy. In the ages and the places long before, most of human toil was enjoyed by a tiny elite.

Also "rendering such a future impossible". This is a retrocausal way of thinking. As though an a bad event in the future makes that future impossible.

PaulDavisThe1st7• 1 year ago

This a late 20th century myopic view of the economy. In the ages and the places long before, most of human toil was enjoyed by a tiny elite.

And overall wealth levels were much lower. It was the expansion of consumption to the masses that drove the enormous increase in wealth that those of us in "developed" countries now live with and enjoy.

Davidzheng• 1 year ago

no the AI doesn't actually need to interact with world economy it just needs to be capable of self-substence by providing energy and material usage. But when AI takes off completely it can vertically integrate with the supply of energy and material.

wealth is not a thing in itself, it's a representation of value and purchasing power. It will create its own economy when it is able to mine material and automate energy generation.

greenavocado2• 1 year ago

You aren't seeing the end goal clearly enough.

The end goal is to ensure the survival of a small group of technocrats that control all production on Earth due to the force multiplier effect of technological advancements. This necessitates the depopulation of Earth.

edg50003• 1 year ago

If I may speculate the opposite: With cost-effective energy and a plateau in AI development, the per-unit cost of an hour of AI compute will be very low, however, the moat remains massive. So a very large amount of people will only be able to function (work) with an AI subscription, concentrating power to those who own AI infra. It will be hard for anybody to break that moat.

palmfacehn• 1 year ago

Your first premise has issues:

In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI

Productivity increases make products cheaper. To the extent that your hypothetical AI manufacturer can produce widgets with less human labor, it only makes sense to do so where it would reduce overall costs. By reducing cost, the manufacturer can provide more value at a lower cost to the consumer.

Increased productivity means greater leisure time. Alternatively, that time can be applied to solving new problems and producing novel products. New opportunities are unlocked by the availability of labor, which allows for greater specialization, which in-turn unlocks greater productivity and the flywheel of human ingenuity continues to accelerate.

The item of UBI is another thorny issue. This may inflate the overall supply of currency and distribute it via political means. If the inflation of the money supply outpaces the productivity gains, then prices will not fall.

Instead of having the gains of productivity allocated by the market to consumers, those with political connections will be first to benefit as per Cantilion effects. Under the worst case scenario this might include distribution of UBI via social credit scores or other dystopian ratings. However, even under what advocates might call the ideal scenario, capital flows would still be dictated by large government sector or public private partnership projects. We see this today with central bank flows directly influencing Wall St. valuations.

TheOtherHobbes• 1 year ago

Increased productivity means greater leisure time.

Productivity has been increasing steadily for decades. Do you see any evidence that leisure time has tracked it?

IMO what will actually happen is feudal stasis after a huge die-off. There will be no market for new products and no ruling class interest in solving new problems.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that this we can see this happening already. This is exactly the ideal world of the Trump administration and its backers. They have literally slashed funding for public health, R&D, and education.

And what's the response? Thiel, Zuckererg, Bezos, and Altman haven't said a word against the most catastrophic reversal of public science policy since Galileo and the Inquisition. Musk is pissed because he's been sidelined, but he was personally involved, through DOGE, in cutting funding to NASA and NOAA.

So what will AI be used for? Clearly the goal is to replace most of the working population. And then what?

One clue is that Musk cares so much about free speech and public debate he's trying to retrain Grok to be less liberal.

None of them - not one - seem even remotely interested in funding new physics, cancer research, abundant clean energy, or any other genuinely novel boundary-breaking application of AI, or science in general. They have the money, they're not doing it. Why?

The focus is entirely on building a nostalgic 1950s world with rockets, robots, apartheid, corporate sovereignty, and ideological management of information and belief.

And that includes AI as a tool for enforcing business-as-usual, not as a tool for anything dangerous, original, or unruly which threatens their political and economic status.

heavyset_go6• 1 year ago

The problem with this calculus is that the AI exists to benefit their owners, the economy itself doesn't really matter, it's just the fastest path to getting what owners want for the time being.

Udo2• 1 year ago

Exactly. And as implied by the term techno-feudalism, the owners are okay with a greatly reduced economy, and in some cases a severe reduction in quality of life overall, as long as they end up ruling over what's left.

tsunamifury2• 1 year ago

Wealth will be replaced by direct power. We do not need an economy.

Most don’t seem to comprehend why the economy is being destroyed by the ultra rich

jandrewrogers2• 1 year ago

A critical flaw in arguments like this is the embedded assumption that the creation of democratic policy is outside the system in some sense. The existence of AGI has the implication that it can effectively turn most people into sock puppets at scale without them realizing they are sock puppets.

Do you think, in this hypothesized environment, that “democratic policy” will be the organic will of the people? It assumes much more agency on the part of people than will actually exist, and possibly more than even exists now.

drdaeman2• 1 year ago

I suspect you’ll probably have to determine the nature of free will (or lack thereof) to answer this. Or, well, learn empirically :-)

foxglacier5• 1 year ago

Normal human communication already does that. Do you really think almost any of the people who share their political opinions came up with them by being rational and working it out from information? Of course not. They just copied what they were told to believe. Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics, it's just "I believe something so I'm right and everybody else is stupid/evil".

drdaeman2• 1 year ago

Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics

Because they have different concerns, and time and attention are scarce. With all possible social changes like the article suggests this focus could change too. Ultimately, when things will get too bad, uprisings happen and sometimes things change. And I hope the more we (collectively) get through, the higher are the chances we start noticing the patterns and stopping early.

NitpickLawyer• 1 year ago

Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics

Not only that, but they actively stop applying critical thinking when the same problem is framed in a political way. And yes it's both sides, and yes the "more educated" the people are, the worse their results are (i.e. almost a complete reversal from framing the same problem as skin care products vs. gun control). Recent paper on this, also covered and somewhat replicated by popular youtubers.

ysofunny• 1 year ago

they way this comment is downvoted goes to show

that most people are viscerally reacting to feeling insulted by being called out about how most of what we think most of the time is simply chorus-like repetition of the general vibe we lead ourselves into believing is the vibe of "our" kind of people. our tribe of like minded individuals; the hacker crowd.

but at least I can admit this. it's only at certain sparse points in anybody's life that we are forced to really think critically; but this experience is terribly difficult and if/when real enough it comes with the existential dread of impossible choices weighted by real world consequences. I remind myself of this so to feel better about how I am indeed a mindless bot preaching to the choir, repeating what I was told to repeat, and pretending that I am fully present and fully free at all times (nobody is... that would be exhausting)

Cheer2171• 1 year ago

Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics

Including you. This is a 3000 year old critique you just uncritically parroted. It is the the original thought terminating cliche. People have always been calling each other ideologically brainwashed NPCs and themselves independent maverick free thinkers.

Except my thoughts are original and critical, everyone else is just a sheep. /s

trhway• 1 year ago

Most critical flaw is thinking that any policy on its own would be able to solve the issue. The technology will find a way no matter the policy.

The society built on empathy would have been able to work out any issue brought by technology as long as empathic goals take priority. Unfortunately our society is far from being based on empathy, to say the least. And technology and the people wielding it would always work around and past the formal laws, rules and policies in such a society. (that isn't to say that all those laws, rules, etc. aren't needed. They are like levies, dams, etc - necessary local, in time and space, fixes which willn't help in the case of the global ocean rise which AGI and robots (even less-than-AGI ones) will be like)

May be it is one of the technological Filters - we didn't become empathic enough (and i mean not only at the individual level, we are even less at the level of the societal systems) before AGI and as a result woudln't be able to instill enough of empathy into the AGI.

jongjong4• 1 year ago

The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection. Yet here we are, everyone believes that 'democracy' necessitates 'voting'; totally ignoring all the issues which come with voting.

The concept of voting, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people, is just dumb. Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates; everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media and they only hear about candidates which were covered by the media; basically only candidates chosen by the establishment. It's a joke. People get the privilege of voting for which party will oppress them.

Current democracy is akin to the media making up a story like 'The Wizard of OZ' and then they offer you to vote for either the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow. You have no idea who any of these candidates are, you can't even be sure if they actually exist. Everything you know about them could literally have been made up by whoever told the story; and yet, when asked to vote, people are sure they understand what they're doing. They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.

PicassoCTs3• 1 year ago

It would make more sense, to vote on policy by giving priorities and preventing impossible votes (cant have tax reduced while demanding more for services)- and then the policy votes get mapped to the corresponding candidates.

softg• 1 year ago

I don't see how selecting the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow at random is going to help with any of the issues you mentioned. Now some rando (or group of randos) that you didn't even know existed gets power based on pure luck. You will still need media to learn about them and they could still be made up.

At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it?

This is a problem of scale. The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime. You didn't need to hatch devious schemes to come to power. You couldn't abuse your fellow men because they would be in charge tomorrow. That's the true power of random selection and it's completely inapplicable to today's society at large.

cmitsakis• 1 year ago

Good idea. Random selection is interesting but I don't know if it can work today. A solutions for the issue you mentioned "Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates" is a system that allows people to vote only for people they know personally, and use some algorithm (maybe something like the PageRank algorithm that Google used) that rates each citizen according to the votes they get but also the votes are valued according to the rating of each citizen. That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. Just an idea. maybe there are problems with that too if it can be gamed but it's worth trying.

afthonos• 1 year ago

Greek states were neither particularly stable nor particularly long-lived. Irrespective of its moral merits, the Greek system was outcompeted by monarchies and eventually the Roman Republic. It’s hard to pinpoint the blame, exactly, but I’d be cautious, especially since modern democracies arguably came about due to the pressures of industrialization, and previous models developed in very different environments.

ta12434• 1 year ago

OK, so I get selected at random.

I haven't got the first clue about governing a country, so I'd rely on people telling me what to do. If they can convince me (which will be easy, trillion dollar companies and powerful billionaire oligarchs convince people to act against their own self interest all the time) they end up running the country, but the blame can be taken by me.

foldr• 1 year ago

There are elements of truth to this, but it’s a wild exaggeration. It feeds into exactly the kind of political cynicism that stops people voting and makes the problem worse.

czl• 1 year ago

best way to implement democracy is via random selection

Long ago I had the same thought as you and a question occurred: the life anyone is born into is a lottery, so hereditary rulers == democracy?

js8• 1 year ago

No, voting is not dumb. Direct voting (referendum), representation and sortition (random selection) are 3 basic democratic mechanisms (they distribute power equally among people).

But each mechanism has different tradeoffs. How much you get involved, how much expertise you need, and how well your interests are represented. A good political system uses all 3 to public's advantage, to reinforce each other.

hearsathought• 1 year ago

The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection.

The greeks ( socrates/plato ) figured out that democracy was a terrible form of government. Then again, the greeks did vote for socrates to drink hemlock.

everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media

Is there anything sweeter than fox news, a "news" company owned by an australian, railing against foreign influence in american politics?

They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.

At this point, I'd prefer we ban campaigning and silly staged debates altogether. Just have each candidate post who their masters are and then let the people vote off that. It's far more value to the voter if they knew who the politicians owe their allegiance to than empty campaign promises.

PicassoCTs3• 1 year ago

You have a world, where most people act against there own economic interests - i think the "mass mind hacking" achievement can be considered unlocked. Its just expensive and exclusive.

lo_zamoyski• 1 year ago

What is an “organic will of the people” anyway?

Democratic societies always involve years of media and other manipulation to plow and seed the minds of the general public with presumptions, associations, spin, appeals to emotion, and so on. The will is a product of belief, and if beliefs are saturated with such stuff, the so-called “will of the people” - a terrifying and tyrannical concept even at face value - is a product of what people have been led to believe by tyrannical and powerful interests. Add to that that most people are utterly unqualified to participate politically, both because they lack the knowledge and reasoning skill, and because of their lack of virtue, acting out of undisciplined fear or appetite. And sadly, much of these disqualifying flaws also characterize our political leadership!

Our political progression follows the decadence described in Plato’s Republic - the decline into timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny - to the letter.

In so-called democratic societies, the association of monarchy and aristocracy with tyranny is unthinking and reflexive, but it is not rational. This is a conditioned prejudice that is ignorant of history. And partly it comes from a hyperliberalism that substitutes a live-and-let-live attitude, situated within a context of objective morality and norms and laws drawn from it, with a pathological, relativizing revolution that seethes at the very idea of moral limits, views them as “tyrannical”, and thus seeks to overthrow them. This necessarily leads to tyranny, as morality is the only protection against tyranny; when the authority of objective truth and good are destroyed, power fills the vacuum. We become psychologically and spiritually conquered. The paradox of such “anarchy” is that it is exactly the condition under which “might makes right” can flourish.

CamperBob24• 1 year ago

The existence of AGI has the implication that it can effectively turn most people into sock puppets at scale without them realizing they are sock puppets.

Fox News already did this in the US, and it didn't take AGI.

93po4• 1 year ago

All corporate media has done this. For example, it's made left leaning people think that only Fox News is the issue when it's all corporate media

burnt-resistor• 1 year ago

Tiny factions especially billionaires already own enough of the US government. The corruption is increasing and the chances for any sort of reform from within are diminishing to near zero. John McCain's failure to achieve campaign finance reform was the canary in the coal mine that no reform from within is possible because the property party (backers of D and R) won't allow it. As such the political operating system is hacked irrevocably. It will have to be displaced and reset by a nonviolent popular uprising.

soco• 1 year ago

"displaced and reset by a nonviolent popular uprising" none of these words are particularly comforting... tough times are a-coming.

bigbadfeline• 1 year ago

It will have to be displaced and reset by a nonviolent popular uprising.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. What do you think the newest pet project of Musk is about? I'm talking of his America's Party initiative - an obvious attempt to direct any popular uprising, be it nonviolent or otherwise, into he same old river bed.

When you say "popular" you have to take into account who decides what's popular these days and why billionaires are tripping all over themselves to get equipped with "social" media of their own.

andsoitis2• 1 year ago

Will there be only one AGI? Or will there be several, all in competition with each other?

arnaudsm• 1 year ago

If they become self improving, the first one would outpace all the other AI labs and capture all the economical value.

ehnto• 1 year ago

There are multiple economic enclaves, even ignoring the explicit borders of nations. China, east asia, Europe, Russia would all operate in their own economies as well as globally.

I also forsee the splitting off of nation internet networks eventually impacting what software you can and cannot use. It's already true, it'll get worse in order to self-protect their economies and internal advantages.

jandrewrogers2• 1 year ago

That depends on how optimized the AGI is for economic growth rate. Too poorly optimized and a more highly optimized fast-follower could eclipse it.

At some point, there will be an AGI with a head start that is also sufficiently close to optimal that no one else can realistically overtake its ability to simultaneously grow and suppress competitors. Many organisms in the biological world adopt the same strategy.

andsoitis2• 1 year ago

Many organisms in the biological world adopt the same strategy.

There isn’t a single organism at the top of the biological pyramid.

edg50003• 1 year ago

I've spent many year moving away from relying on third parties and got my own servers, do everything locally and with almost no binary blobs. It has been fun, saved me money and created a more powerful and pleasant IT environment.

However, I recently got a 100 EUR/m LLM subscription. That is the most I've spend on IT excluding a CAD software license. So've made a huge 180 and now am firmly back on the lap of US companies. I must say I've enjoyed my autonomy while it lasted.

One day AI will be democratized/cheap allowing people to self host what are now leading edge models, but it will take a while.

cco• 1 year ago

Have you tried out Gemma3? The 4b parameter model runs super well on a Macbook as quickly as ChatGPT 4o. Of course the results are a bit worse and other product features (search, codex etc) don't come along for the ride, but wow, it feels very close.

int_19h4• 1 year ago

On any serious task, it's not even close. There's no free lunch.

greenavocado2• 1 year ago

This isn't a serious contender. You need dual AMD EPYC CPUs and 400 GB of RAM for a proper affordable Deepseek self hosting setup

Folcon2• 1 year ago

Out of curiosity, what use case or difference caused the 180?

AstroBen• 1 year ago

Bit obvious isn't it?

A girlfriend simulator

edg50003• 1 year ago

Claude Code, where it can use tools and iterate; if it makes mistakes it will know as well and retry, this is a massive boost from copy pasting into chat and getting the trust broken by the LLM confidently making mistakes. By having it be responsible for the results, it has increased utility. E.g. "when I run the program I get error X, see if you can find out what caused it. Run make in ./build and run the program to see if the error is gone". In addition, Claude has written some nice code on occasion that was simply no different that how I would have done it. In a few sentences I can explain my coding style and the rest is derrived from existing code.

rossy• 1 year ago

I don't see how AI can become democratized. (I don't follow this stuff too closely, but) it seems like larger models with less quantization and more parameters always outperform smaller models of the same type, and that trend isn't stopping, so if/when we get consumer hardware and local models that equal today's SotA SaaS models, the SotA SaaS models of that time will be even better, and even more impossible to run on consumer hardware. Not to mention that local AI is reliant on handouts from big business - both in base models that the community could never afford to train themselves, and in high-VRAM GPUs that can run big models, so if SaaS AI is more profitable, I don't think we'll be "allowed" to run the SotA at home.

Human skill was already democratized in that anyone can obtain skills, and businesses have to be good at managing those people if they want to profit from those skills - ultimately the power is in the hands of the skilled individuals. But in the hypothetical AI future, where AI has superhuman skill, and human skills are devalued, it seems like there will be a more cynical, direct conversion between the money you can spend and the quality of your output, and local/self-hosted AI will never be able to compete with the resources of big business.

Synaesthesia• 1 year ago

It's up to us to create the future that we want. We may need to act communally to achieve that, but people naturally do that.

tim333• 1 year ago

I figure if/when AI can do the work of humans we'll deal with it through democracy by voting for a system like UBI or like socialism.

That doesn't work now because we don't have AGIs to do the chores but when we do that changes.

staunton• 1 year ago

For this to be plausible, you have to explain why the people controlling the AI would share their wealth.

They would either do it voluntarily (and be outcompeted by those who don't?) or be coerced (by who? Someone who doesn't have AI but is more powerful than they are?).

linotype• 1 year ago

Worrying about this kind of stuff is pointless as there’s literally nothing you or I could do to stop it. Best thing to do is prepare and have the best life you can now.

digdugdirk• 1 year ago

That's simply not true at all. This site has a far higher percentage of individuals who are in a position to enact legitimate change in the current dynamic. That could range from people in higher level decision-making positions, to interns who could sandbag these companies by purposely being worse developers than their skills and abilities might otherwise allow them to be.

ETH_start• 1 year ago

Hard to believe something so ideologically loaded passes as scientific inquiry nowadays.

coyleandrew• 1 year ago

The notion that AGI’s rise will stifle creativity is, in itself, a misreading of history. Technology has always been a force that enhances human ingenuity. The printing press didn’t kill creativity; it multiplied it. The rise of personal computers didn’t make writers obsolete; it created entire new industries. AGI is simply the next chapter in this narrative, enabling creativity on a scale never before possible.

Rather than fearing the loss of traditional employment, we should embrace the explosion of new roles that AGI will make possible.

schnitzelstoat• 1 year ago

We are nowhere near AGI though. I suspect it is still centuries away.

An LLM is essentially autocomplete with some very clever tricks that allow it to do some tasks quite well. But it is not even conceptually close to actual intelligence.

Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?

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