Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

https://gmalandrakis.com/writings/ad-economicum.html

by l0new0lf-G • 1 month ago

290 577 1 month ago

gmalandrakis.com

vintagedave• 1 month ago

This seems the kind of (scarily true) thing I’d expect Charles Stross to write about.

Procrastes• 1 month ago

Yes, definitely. Shades of Accelerando, Saturn's Children, and Neptune's Brood. Give me the tentacles any day.

skybrian6• 1 month ago

Suppose we modeled this as two separate countries:

* AI Island: just runs AI in data centers.

* Elsewhere: same as now.

Wouldn't there be gains from trade?

Sure, AI Island might be able to provide lots of cheap Internet services, but you can't eat Internet. Wouldn't they want something in exchange?

And wouldn't there still be lots of jobs in Elsewhere that can't be done over the Internet and have nothing to do with AI Island? If AI Island charges too much, they can always trade among themselves.

monknomo• 1 month ago

I think this mentions that AI Island also has robots than can produce most goods

skybrian6• 1 month ago

I don't see why we should take that scenario seriously.

In part because agriculture is already heavily mechanized and many factories already have lots of robots. How much would access to an LLM improve the robots?

2001zhaozhao• 1 month ago

Inb4 the economy is just a paperclip maximizer, a hedonium maximizer, and 5 different AGIs built to maximally enrich their creators all trading with each other.

jzig• 1 month ago

You just described the plot of Alien: Earth!

moomoo112• 1 month ago

lol or my favorite theory: I wake up and it is 1994. I am 3 years old, outside with my grandpa <3

well, shit. here we go again.

like, what even is consciousness and all that :s sorry, just thought i'd share lol

jordwest• 1 month ago

Paraphrasing Nate Hagens, at the end of the day the modern economy just turns megalitres of oil into microlitres of dopamine

Quinner• 1 month ago

For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.

hurtigioll5• 1 month ago

I guess you don't know about North Korea

chongli4• 1 month ago

We do know about North Korea. It doesn't exist in a bubble. It's a product of a particular culture and a particular series of historical events as well as regional and geopolitical relationships, most notably its relationships with South Korea, China, and the US.

The claim that the North Korean dystopian dictatorship could be generalized to all cultures, across all cultures, merely on the economic and military capabilities of AI, is an extraordinary one. It relies on a great many assumptions about the political as well as independent, personal, and organized responses to the societal changes that would need to take place in order to bring it about.

ang_cire• 1 month ago

I love how you act like it's an insane premise, then go on to list a bunch of stuff that's literally happening now...

materielle• 1 month ago

Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.

One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives.

Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value.

That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top.

If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis.

Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.

TomasBM• 1 month ago

You're interpreting the claims more strongly than they were presented, IMO.

One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group

There doesn't have to be a fully cohesive group of an entire class for there to be negative consequences for the non-members of that class. The members also don't have to be cohesive or aligned at first, but they will tend to align on issues that threaten their position.

For example, we have historically seen that the incumbent elites tend to be anti-socialist/-communist, because their relative position and power are threatened, even if their populations and some (aspiring) elites are remotely pro-socialist. And because the coercive power of incumbents is often much higher than the power of some populace or aspirants (i.e., they have more to offer to those who hold coercive power), they will tend to succeed in pushing against the majority.

The entire history of the US, UK, Germany, France, Russia (etc.) is full of such examples.

that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy.

It doesn't have to be hermetically sealed to exclude certain populations.

On a global level, many countries don't trade with each other, and their economies are doing fine. Hard sanctions and cold wars even make this intentional, rather than a product of "we don't have anything to offer to each other".

On a local level, most people don't interact with the "homeless"/unhoused, and the latter often don't have much to offer to the former. Most Western countries don't need to hermetically separate the rich from the rest, but if you look at Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia or even the US, gated communities are common in some areas. Most of the rest outside don't have much to offer to those inside.

Taken together: if it's plausible, and we don't know how probable it may be, we may want to figure that out, instead of hoping it's not probable.

smcg• 1 month ago

Have you seen the lists of members of rich people's group chats? Rich people coordinate much better than non-rich people.

nisegami• 1 month ago

Is this supposed to be sarcastic?

throw391912321• 1 month ago

I've seen this idea float around r/singularity and r/collapse for years and it's probably responsible for a horrifying amount of suicides at this point.

It's not even that good of an argument. It makes some incredibly flimsy assumptions; reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history, ultra-compliant superintelligences, a perfectly unitary elite without any desire to defect, all other societal variables staying the same somehow, etc.. It only exists because of upvote algorithms amplifying emotional action-suppressing doomer content. Really not that different from other hostile memes like QAnon.

I would really like if people stopped spreading this anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy. It's something I have to give Luke Drago some points for, he actually cares about the problem rather than just saying the inevitable eternal stratification hypersuffering anti-singularity is inevitable and implying that death is preferable.

smallmancontrov11• 1 month ago

All workable policy paths involve taxing capital and you're gonna call that Marxist even though it isn't, so we're at an impasse.

stevenwoo• 1 month ago

Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.

jplusequalt• 1 month ago

reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history

Not that I agree with all of Marx's ideas, but I think this is one of his less controversial ideas. There has always been a class struggle between business owners and workers, and there probably always will be.

anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy

An increasing amount of US citizens have little to no trust in our government to actually come up with a viable solution that helps the people in a world where AI automation is happening across multiple sectors at once.

You want to address the paranoia people feel? You have to also address that lack of trust in our government. That's a tall order.

confidantlake2• 1 month ago

It isn't inevitable but it is where we are heading. We are basically in the early 1930s. Even fighting against it and winning is going to be extremely ugly. And that is the most optimistic scenario.

andrewmutz• 1 month ago

If you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy.

If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.

david_shi5• 1 month ago

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

Jtarii2• 1 month ago

Krugman is a bitch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM

Animats• 1 month ago

I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence. That was pushed over the top by hype and overfunding before it was cost effective. Like Uber and Space-X.

hurtigioll5• 1 month ago

Taleb joke:

junior trader for a bank looses $10 mil. boss asks him what happened. trader says he sold oil because bank economist said oil price will go down. boss fires him. junior asks how could he become a good trader if he's fired on the first losing trade. boss says "no, you idiot, I didn't fire you because you made a losing trade, I fired you because you listened to our economist"

smallmancontrov11• 1 month ago

Just remember that the US purged left-leaning economists during the cold war and the field re-grew under intense think-tank incentives towards the economic right, so if you think labor/capital dynamics might be important to the AI revolution you really ought to balance your "random" sampling of US economists with some Piketty (Atkinson, Stiglitz, Zucman -- but in an era where reading even one book is considered a herculean feat of focus, "Capital in the Twenty First Century" by Piketty is the canonical pick).

pirate787• 1 month ago

Piketty is just a marxist flailing around, backfilling data to fit his belief that communism is the solution for every problem. He's been spectacularly wrong in his predictions so far, for example he said Milei would be "devastating" for Argentina and the opposite is the case.

TalkingCodeMonk• 1 month ago

Also remember that the Koch Bros (plus numerous other billionaires) have spent billions [0] poisoning economics academia by funding their narcissistic version of pseudo-libertarianism across think tanks, lobbyists, and colleges... They're so "Libertarian" they believe corporate dictatorship is freedom and poisoning their communities is the communities problem.

I remember first going to a party at an Economics students house 20 years ago, and thinking they all seemed like they were in a cult. Wasn't until fairly recently I figured out it was from propaganda.

[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network

koe1233• 1 month ago

I come from a research background, and transitioned to software later. There is an interesting tendency of software engineers to believe they have skills outside of their skillset.

Relevant here: the would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?

drtz• 1 month ago

would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?

Valid point, but it suggests a mathematician who understands the math behind AI is more capable of grasping its trajectory, which is probably not the case.

People who are deep in the inner workings of this stuff day in and day out are the only ones who have a chance at having any real insight.

PaulHoule2• 1 month ago

Part of my software engineering skillset is "going native" with subject matter experts to be able to get more out out of them and even work around the lack of sufficient SME on a project.

I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.

827a• 1 month ago

If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, in fact, don't listen to anyone, no one was able to predict what the economy was going to do pre-AI, no one has any clue what's going on.

athrowaway3z2• 1 month ago

No serious economist would claim such a thing. In fact, it was all the rage a decade ago for economists to remind everyone that they - in fact - should not be looked at to do this.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

amelius2• 1 month ago

listen to economists

Did anyone ever keep track of how often economists turn out to be right about anything? I didn't, but have the feeling that it isn't much better than flipping a coin.

corimaith2• 1 month ago

Reality is messy. But they are the ones at least thinking the most about this, and I'd say the coin is still overall weighted in their favour than listening to an uninformed opinion.

dismalaf• 1 month ago

There's a lot of bad economics and assumptions here even if the conclusion is plausible.

Yes, an economy of robots harvesting things to serve a few masters (or they takeover themselves Terminator-style) is possible and perhaps the end game.

Thompsonflimsy• 1 month ago

This whole post rests on a basic misunderstanding of economics.

dlev_pika3• 1 month ago

Which is?

jaggederest3• 1 month ago

GDP = C + I + G + Xn = W + I + R + P

(To grossly simplify the single-nation macroeconomic picture, at least)

C = consumption I = investment (the first one) G = government Xn = net exports

W = wages paid to labor I = interest on capital R = rent on resources and real property P = profit to entrepreneurs

consumption ~= wages, so if wages go to zero, the economy massively shrinks unless government steps in with something like taxation to fund UBI, sovereign wealth fund distributions, or direct universal ownership.

moomoo112• 1 month ago

found the economist (just kidding)

Catloafdev• 1 month ago

ctrl+f rentier: 0 hits

ya...

reasonableklout• 1 month ago

See also https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory which was thoroughly discussed 17 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712 (1426 comments).

sdevonoes• 1 month ago

Isn’t it clear that the “enemy” of 99% of the people in the world (and in HN) are the ultra rich? Therefore we shouldn’t use Claude/Gemini/OpenAI?

It’s not about stopping progress, rather stopping the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful over our lives. Whether we can use claude to automate a fucking script or service is meaningless compared to that.

The dream of elon musk et al is to keep accumulating power and have non-humans serve them. They don’t want us, and as soon as they can they will replace us. But here we are giving them more power. Ridiculous

confidantlake2• 1 month ago

Damn downvoted to oblivion 3 minutes after you posted this. The bots are out in force on this one.

bayarearefugee• 1 month ago

But here we are giving them more power.

Sure, but those of us who need to earn income are in a prisoner's dilemma with billions of actors and realistically we'll never coordinate that boycott.

On the other hand, the OP article ignores the fact that while the economy might not need us, if/when enough people's actual material life conditions degrade beyond a certain point, there will be an old fashioned bloody revolution.

So the real practical question ends up being how good the ultra rich can make their AI defense bots before that happens.

johnsmith18402• 1 month ago

I don't think ultra weathy are a bad thing if their results move society foward. As of right now it's very obvious they are mostly aligned mostly because how technology functions.

Easily agree regulation or different actions can be done to improve aspects but the raw progress is undeniable. I think our current regulation space is doing a decent job without killing ecobomic progress.

I see no other economic system driving as effeciently as heavily rewarding greed. You can't create the future by commitee.

California is a great model here. Maga hate it because of liberal policies, liberals hate it because the insane economic wealth generation. But if california attacks their wealthy and the engine that drives that watch it completely collapse the system.

If you hate the california model and the no regulation/tax republican model of US then I hard disagree. China roughly operates in the no regulation model and pulled 850M people out of poverty with a stupid weath divide and hyper elite but they are overall FAR better off now because of that greed alignment.

EU is another alternative and they are slowly moving to the edge of collapse. Mass tax/regulation AND no wealth generation.

Choose your poison but there's really no other magical alternative here.

sp5273• 1 month ago

This author's writing style is too obnoxious for me to have gotten all the way through it, but the important thing is that he's wrong.

Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included.

Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is bridged by hopeful investors and creditors.

The present AI buildout is an example of this. And it is not immune from the principle. There will ultimately need to be real people generating real demand somewhere in the economy in order to justify an economic return on the massive outlay.

Government expenditures are also included. Tax dollars used to pay for things are ultimately satisfying demand generated by citizens. Even, believe it or not, a deranged government blowing up random people in the Middle East. That still traces to the (perceived) security needs of some population.

The aggregate demand equation is as follows:

AD = C + I + G + NX

C = Consumer Spending I = Investment G = Government Spending NX = Net Exports

What's going to happen in the future is that demand will have to shift in this equation. Remember that Investment needs to be justified by some demand created elsewhere — it is in essence the purchase of an IOU predicated on future demand that must ultimately trace down to real people. We are all broadly in agreement that Consumption will contract, as labor is progressively disempowered and capital continues to concentrate. Let's ignore NX.

The answer is that the sources of demand in the future will likely shift to, primarily, (1) demand still generated by wealthy people consuming things (e.g. mansions, yachts, rockets, ego-affirming Mars colonies) and (2) government spending that serves entire populations.

This all assumes, of course, that we continue with the present economic model, in spite of the immense human suffering and turmoil that is likely on the horizon, as we transition into a fundamentally different technological age.

hurtigioll5• 1 month ago

we do not trade with animals, for they have nothing to offer.

AIs will not trade with us, for we have nothing to offer.

sp5273• 1 month ago

AIs are not conscious and do not have real needs that are detached from a real person. That can certainly be simulated, but I would hope that we can collectively agree to unplug them should that situation arise.

bethekidyouwant• 1 month ago

They are not self replicating yet…

bmacho3• 1 month ago

Some animals are cute and can simulate human children.

Other animals are capable of some tasks, like dogs searching for drugs, bombs or people, or helping the blind. Most animals however are kept for their bodies: meat, milk, egg, fur, skin.

The movie Matrix explores this idea, humans are kept alive for their bodies. They are not kept in constant suffering at least, as we do with many animals.

atleastoptimal• 1 month ago

Many people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe.

The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc)

If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.

ethersteeds• 1 month ago

Sounds terrible

mawadev• 1 month ago

What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.

Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?

annzabelle• 1 month ago

"AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.

AndrewKemendo2• 1 month ago

Fully agree with this

My personal agent system is actually chartered around funding/generating its own energy resources in the long term.

Its most likely going to have a copy of itself running on a solar powered server somewhere before I know it LOL

thoughtpeddler• 27 days ago

I don't know how successful you'll be in this, but I just want to say this is inspiring! Kind of "Voyager spacecraft"-esque in how your system will be running in perpetuity

xg15• 1 month ago

Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?

jstanley3• 1 month ago

That's like asking of the Internet "communication for whom?"

The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.

It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.

Why is it so hard to imagine that humans may not be a necessary component in the economy?

dodu_• 1 month ago

Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).

This timeline is straight ass.

coderenegade• 1 month ago

The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.

What's more likely to happen is that the economy might split. Organizations that have no need for human labor or input are essentially islands unto themselves. The only remaining economic link is the substrate -- the land we all inhabit -- is shared.

I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.

bediger40002• 1 month ago

Once the owning class owns mostly everything and* has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them. It barely has real consequences for them already -as they have consistently ended up richer after the dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the covid recession.*

The coming out richer part is undeniably true, but I have doubts about the conclusion, which is something like "after oligarchs own everything, they don't need many people". Look, even the old Bell System required participation of about a third of the US population.

Oligarchs might be able to have young, fit concubines, and loyal, retainers with steel thews if there's a population of less than a third of today, but they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists. Telegram communications might be possible, but who's going to maintain gigawatts of data centers for such a population? I'm pretty sure "AI" will slip away in such a world, but who needs waifus when real harems can exist?

sosomoxie4• 1 month ago

they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists

They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.

bediger40002• 1 month ago

LLM AI won't give them a cancer cure, guaranteed.

kingstnap• 1 month ago

What AI really seems to be posed to do is make labour a lot less valuable and capital a lot more valuable.

Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.

smallmancontrov11• 1 month ago

We've moved all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and the well is running dry. There's nothing to be done!

NuclearPM• 1 month ago

More tax cuts to the rich.

jMyles2• 1 month ago

Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.

Why presume that "running a government" is inevitable at all? How much longer do we think these states of old are going to putter on for?

chongli4• 1 month ago

Governments are inevitable. Even when you look at so-called "lawless places" or "failed states", you'll find governments: de-facto governments run by warlords and criminals.

Nature abhors a vacuum and that principle extends to power vacuums.

phendrenad2• 1 month ago

Why does running a government require a lot of cash flow? To pay people? Like, labor..?

po1nt3• 1 month ago

Economy is not zero sum game [1]. The fact that someone has more, doesn't mean everyone else is worse off because of it. Many hungry african kids can look upon the people from first world and ponder the same question. "How will the rich people that have everything survive now, that with AI they will have even more" except from their perspective, we are the elon musks in their eyes.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchange-not-zero-sum-game

Jtarii2• 1 month ago

A poor example considering Musk is responsible for a substantial increase in hunger in Africa recently.

johnsmith18402• 1 month ago

Giving away things is not mandatory. If a homeless man is dependent on you to leave money for him and you stop one day it's not your fault he has a tough time.

In the same sense Africa is far better off now than it has ever been because of advances in the west.

Probally the same for humans and hyper future AI. We will not have the recources they do but will naturally have 100x better lives because of them even though it will be deeply unequal.

po1nt3• 1 month ago

I'm not here to defend Elon Musk, but what is the context of this?

pooploop64• 1 month ago

Im getting really tired of these cloudflare anti-ddos screens. They take forever, often literally. There's another one of these that shows an anime girl, whatever that one is, it's way better.

elendilm2• 1 month ago

Same here.

stult2• 1 month ago

Literally does not work for me at all, just keeps reloading and spinning. I'm not even on my VPN. Really frustrating dealing with these things lately.

applfanboysbgon• 1 month ago

I like Anubis, I immediately exit if I see Cloudfare. The UX of the latter is so much worse even when it works, takes 5x longer and has a pattern of wait --> require interaction --> wait whereas Anubis requires no interaction, is almost instant, and is a bit of cute whimsy that makes me smile.

vasco• 1 month ago

The Economy is not only an abstract concept, but a very twisted and perverse one as well. It once used to refer to the well-being of the masses

When?

We already have more empty houses than homeless people, more food than we eat, and more medicine than we use, yet people die starving or untreated anyway.

10x more people die of car crashes than famine globally. And about the same die from tobacco exposure than malnutrition which is a wider net to cast.

If we just focus on advanced economies basically nobody dies of famine and less people die of malnutrition than car crashes by a long margin.

A lot of this article is just vibes, not data.

elendilm2• 1 month ago

Exactly. The author is a clueless idiot.

codexon2• 1 month ago

I've held this view and talked about it many times here before.

It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat.

Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.

__s• 1 month ago

Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up

YZF2• 1 month ago

For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?

That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and their rulers fight and trade. Or all of earth is government by one oppressive dictator. So far it seems the broader incentives/forces push us in a different direction.

AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.

jaggederest3• 1 month ago

To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.

codexon2• 1 month ago

Why does it feel silly? There are already billionaires, and now Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and they still want more even though they have enough money to spend for several lifetimes.

Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.

pixl9710• 1 month ago

What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?

I mean, there may be some things certain groups specialize in, like augmented obedient humans with 15 titties that these people trade back and forth.

But here's the thing, what if they don't need to trade anything? You get to be a nation unto yourself (and your slaves).

The particular problem we have is without something for 'labor' to do in the future the world we have now breaks.

ggm• 1 month ago

If nobody is being paid, who is buying, and what defines the price and elasticity?

I mean this has a lot of "Pooh! that's not honey, thats SOCIALISM" in it

whatever13• 1 month ago

Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital?

It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.

This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just mass produce robots to protect you.

dyauspitr5• 1 month ago

Whatever, let it happen. Humans working on anything other than exactly what they want to do is stupid. The few will eventually have to give the masses the necessities at some point though that can happen in one of two ways, from the very beginning or wrested forcefully after a painful era. Both are better than the current paradigm of what is essentially slavery with extra steps. A world where a human can work exactly on whatever they’re passionate about or not work at all if they don’t want to is the ideal.

aidenn0• 1 month ago

How will the people working on exactly what they want to eat?

mc329• 1 month ago

I think everyone who is able should earn their keep. From ants to lions, to survive and live, even if in meager spurts they must put in some work.

oh_my_goodness4• 1 month ago

Without jobs, and after our savings run out, we will be homeless people. Then, after that, we can try to bargain for ... whatever homeless people get in this society. It doesn't look like much to me.

Call it 'basic income' if that helps.

jameslk11• 1 month ago

Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.

Where do these few acquire all their wealth?

What happens when these remaining few need to compete?

whatever13• 1 month ago

In the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land.

Now if we are lucky and the owners are humans with a good heart (and not AI), maybe there is some room for some people (aka provide authentic experiences)

lazide4• 1 month ago

In any given game, why are there always a few (say 3) top players?

Same reason.

baron8162• 1 month ago

Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized.

The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.

cousin_it• 1 month ago

I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.

aabhay• 1 month ago

Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires

ransom1538• 1 month ago

"Why is it a winner takes all situation?"

I have lawyer agent x10 better than yours in a civil matter. Guess who wins. What value is second best lawyer?

rdedev• 1 month ago

It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.

The underlying assumption here is that there is always something established players won't try to buy out new companies or use their existing capital to screw over others

The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies

Right now that is not the case. Look at the PC industry. I worry for the autonomy of a consumer in the future. It's probably going to be something like here is your rental thin client PC with agents on a monthly rental plan. What's that? you want to build a game with your own gpu? No no. A consumer grade gpu does not make sense in this day and age. Just ask the agent to build your game. We need the gpu compute for better things

bigbadfeline3• 1 month ago

Why is it a winner takes all situation?

Because there are a few winners who are happy to collectively monopolize the market - e.g RAM - nobody is increasing production, China is blocked from the market by sanctions and tariffs, the rest are more than happy to ask for a 1000% more than just a few years ago. Why would they do anything else - it's absolutely not in their interest for the prices to come down.

There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI.

There isn't and won't be any "intense competition" - nobody can compete without hardware and it's now monopolized and affordable only to a token few.

It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.

In the light of the current reality, this can only be classified as hallucinations. Actually, previously commoditized markets have become inaccessible and the trend is the exact opposite of what you're saying. It's bizarre to read naked assertions, which are not only without evidence but with all evidence pointing to the opposite.

That competition is going to bring down costs for everything.

Back to reality, a new Teddy Roosevelt isn't going to magically reappear, not in either of the two parties. Imagine the world without him... we're almost there.

BobbyTables23• 1 month ago

Ironically, if 1 person had 99.99% of all the wealth in the world, I’m not entirely sure it would have as much meaning as one might assume.

The one with the wealth would be effectively be unable to obtain greater wealth, power, or influence.

Other this individual being able to command arbitrary amounts of goods and services, the rest would compete for the remaining scraps as we do today.

Ironically, if they want technological innovation and all the fancy toys that result, then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it!

Holding on to all the wealth so that nobody else can get it would be highly detrimental to a capitalistic society.

ShinyLeftPad• 1 month ago

For some people it's a zero sum game. If you have 99% of it, you won.

foogazi• 1 month ago

then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it

They can give them drones to aim at - enjoy your serfdom, let the AI tell you how to live your best life, don’t worry and don’t step out of the walled garden

AngryData6• 1 month ago

I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in 100+ miles with EM noise. And that is assuming their isn't any larger organized resistance organizations.

pixl9710• 1 month ago

EMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off.

The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide.

Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.

bigbadfeline3• 1 month ago

I think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans.

It's a supreme delusion that it can't. Military tech isn't in the 19th century anymore.

__MatrixMan__2• 1 month ago

Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.

Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets.

I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.

e40• 1 month ago

Of course it does. It’s still a measurement though against other super rich.

pmontra• 1 month ago

Wealth is not a goal, it shouldn't be. Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power, not necessarily with money. So yes, it will always matter especially to people that like to have power over other people.

verisimi• 1 month ago

Monetary wealth is a proxy for power.

Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried.

I think this is already the case.

fooker• 1 month ago

Paperclip maximizer

stephc_int1311• 1 month ago

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.

The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.

This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.

But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.

This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.

jameslk11• 1 month ago

The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.

The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more

But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions

jbxntuehineoh• 1 month ago

Everyone wants more

Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.

stephc_int1311• 1 month ago

Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.

Johanx644• 1 month ago

The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around.

Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.

It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.

People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.

Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.

Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.

captainbland2• 1 month ago

The masses work because they want to consume

For many millennials and younger working people a huge bulk of income is taken up by housing. There's also a cliff edge of jobs when you transition from full time to part time, it's only rarely possible to find part time work which pays enough to sustain living costs.

This leads to a situation in which people have to work full time in order to meet basic conditions of living and many consumer items like TVs and streaming subscriptions can be had at prices which are negligible compared to their fundamental living costs.

d2ou• 1 month ago

everyone wants more

Some evidence of satiation have been shown in five western countries. Satiation is defined in the following work as an income level where more money dont increase subjective well being. The threshold varies and could very well depend on the generosity of the social safety net : https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/8199185

wyldfire• 1 month ago

Physics, or ... capital.

Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining.

Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.

stephc_int1311• 1 month ago

No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.

peterldowns• 1 month ago

Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.

stephc_int1311• 1 month ago

I have not, but I am curious.

I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.

marcus_holmes• 1 month ago

But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.

Loughla• 1 month ago

I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans.

Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.

theptip4• 1 month ago

The important question is, who has power in such an economy?

In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.

Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.

I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.

david_shi5• 1 month ago

Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights.

If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).

dosisking• 1 month ago

But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"

imtringued3• 1 month ago

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.

Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment.

You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on.

You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters.

You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either.

You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips.

You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house.

Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm.

You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work.

A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is.

Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.

That sounds a whole lot like consumption to me.

gkaivida1• 1 month ago

It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value.

Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes.

That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy"

Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.

stephc_int1311• 1 month ago

You missed the point entirely.

What fuels the economy, for now, is human work. Being a consumer simply means that you are heavily incentivised to take part (by working).

If machines can do the same or better, whoever owns them will end-up seeing unproductive humans as dangerous and wasteful bloat.

It won’t be a life of infinite leisure if you don’t own machines.

iamflimflam1• 1 month ago

Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.

When we hit AGI and the robots rise up against us. Make sure you delete this post.

stymaar• 1 month ago

AGI is supposed to be about the capabilities of AI, there's no reason why they should have developed self consciousness/self preservation / willingness to exert control, in the process.

(And conversely, universal paperclip is a great illustration that an autonomous agent doesn't need to achieve human-like intelligence to “rise” against us)

doctorwho428• 1 month ago

Who owns the machines and their output?

I don't think anyone is saying that it wouldn't be great if we didn't have to work to survive and thrive. What they are saying is, based on current trends, we are more heading for one of those scifi dystopias than star trek.

Windchaser4• 1 month ago

In Star Trek, also, there was a huge world war with hundreds of millions dead. WW3, which almost killed humanity, before they united and created the sci-fi utopia.

The hard part is that we don't know if we'll ever get the utopia.

stult2• 1 month ago

Man, I really freaking hate cloudflare bot checks. I can't even access this site, which I presume is just a few kilobytes of simple static HTML with some straightforward text content. I shouldn't have to work this hard to prove I'm human, it's exhausting

Rzor• 1 month ago

https://imgur.com/a/peopleless-economy-terrifyingly-enough-n...

https://pastebox.io/paste/ZtZHQETZcjdh

https://pastes.io/OZqRw8jT

bmacho3• 1 month ago

Flag the websites you can't access. If enough people flag them the moderators will take them down from the front page.

PaulHoule2• 1 month ago

See https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/page/n7/m...

whack2• 1 month ago

Imagine if the top 0.001% build and jointly own an ASI that makes human labor completely obsolete in every single way. This seems like the worst case scenario for the rest of us, right? Wrong. In this scenario, these 0.001% would not interact with the rest of us in any way. They will not hire us, they will not buy anything from us, and they will not sell anything to us either. After all, the rest of us are completely obsolete to them, so what benefit could they possibly have in interacting with us? They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.

At that point, from the perspective of the rest of us, they simply don't exist. And their ASI wouldn't exist either. We would get back to the world as it was pre-ASI. One where all of us need stuff that others among us can offer, and we hire one another and buy stuff from one another. Sure, things aren't as great as they could have been. But the status quo isn't the worst thing in the world either.

The scenario that is a lot more concerning/weird is the more realistic one, where ASI makes 99% of human labor obsolete - but not the remaining 1%. At that point, the ASI owners will hold American-idol style auditions where thousands of hopefuls vie for the opportunity to be in that lucky 1%. Auditions where we beg and plead shamelessly to be chosen by the ASI owners. Auditions where the losers are left to scrounge for the 2nd hand, 3rd hand, and 4th hand scraps, that trickle down from the 1%.

I hope to god that when an ASI is built, and in the unlikely case that it doesn't simply overthrow humanity, that we will have a political structure in place that gives everyone a meaningful share in the fruits of ASI. Or that the owners of this ASI consider every other human to be utterly useless, f off to their Randian paradise, and leave the rest of us completely alone. The middle ground between these two is where dystopia lives

totetsu• 1 month ago

Unless this ASI either way, turns the world into an opencast mine and burns off the atmosphere on the way out..

jeremysalwen2• 1 month ago

I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% less interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply. "Humans will be so rich they will fuck off to other parts of the world and leave gorilla habitat alone" hasn't really panned out so well.

whack2• 27 days ago

I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% less interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply

If they have zero need for human labor, that implies that they have a limitless swarm of AI powered machinery that can build and do anything they want. Why bother trying to take your oil, when they can build a massive solar farm in the sahara desert. Why bother trying to take your house when they can live on a completely deserted private island

pixl9710• 1 month ago

They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse.

See, this is where I believe you are both confused and wrong.

Their servers need energy, their bots need materials, these things come from real ownership of land. There are also things said rich people like, such as beautiful locations. And all of these beautiful locations are filled with ugly stinky people that are more poor than them. At least some of these rich people will want to 'deal' with this problem.

pianopatrick• 1 month ago

The idea that the economy is based on "consumption" depends on how you define "consumption".

If you think of "consumption" as "buying real world products from Wal Mart or Amazon" then that is wrong, the US economy is not really based on that.

Most GDP in the US comes from the service sector. And one thing is true about human nature - a lot of people like having other people serve them.

There are many things that machines can do for us but we still pay people to do them for us. For example, machines in a food plant can cook pasta and pack that pasta into a frozen dinner that you could eat at home. But people still like going out for a pasta dinner

So even if AI is going to replace a whole lot of jobs, you would still have some people paying others to serve them just because people like having other people serve them.

peab• 1 month ago

but would the scale stay the same?

Take a hotel for example - it's nice to have a butler, someone at the front desk, and a waiter, perhaps. But you don't need the cleaning crew, the kitchen staff, etc, that run behind the scenes. These you could replace with robots, no problem.

pj_mukh• 1 month ago

Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1].

tl;dr: The most likely scenario is that AI affects us at the scale of the internet. Revolutionary, but nothing that fundamentally gets rid of labor economics (like this article posits).

[1] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

baron8162• 1 month ago

It’s an economic fallacy that a group of people would get “locked out” of the economy.

If you and I are able to work, but can’t get jobs because robots do all the jobs, then we’re not just going to sit on our hands and starve. You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.

The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.

ares6233• 1 month ago

Or, what the billionaires are actually thinking, remove entire swathes of the population from the equation.

Now the reasonable ones might think "hey, even if that sounds 'rational', isn't that very risky? What happens if the machines don't actually cut it? Then we'd be stuck with not enough people to support our lavish lifestyles? And we can't exactly spin up millions of people in an instant, so where does that leave us?"

Well, they wouldn't be billionaires if they were reasonable so here we are.

As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a billionaire"

shimman4• 1 month ago

You should check out "Four Futures" by Peter Frase. This would be the "extermination" future and like you I think it's the most likely one without extreme counteraction.

xyzzy123• 1 month ago

You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.

Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.

Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.

The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?

If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.

This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.

qsera11• 1 month ago

Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need..

How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?

Who owns the robots though..

I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

markdown• 1 month ago

The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.

imtringued3• 1 month ago

Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.

If you permit me to reference the blog post:

It is a well attested fact that human logic is far from flawless. We are all victims of our biases, emotions, and equally importantly, our implicit assumptions. Just like in mathematics, where all our theorems stem from sets of axioms, so do our beliefs stem from assumptions. But unlike in mathematics, where the axioms are concrete, explicit, and shaped by natural observations, the human logic's axioms are more abstract, implicit, and shaped by our knowledge and our cultural background.

You're making an implicit assumption that all land is owned by people who want to deprive you of the land and its products. You can't make the argument that a "rich person" is holding onto the land and eating all of the food produced by it, so it would be unfair for the "rich person" to give you access to the food.

The underlying problem here is access to land and this is an independent concern from "The Economy".

Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.

Ok so you mentioned it, but this means we are no longer talking about the machines. In fact the presence or absence of machines is a completely irrelevant factor here. If you can get your hands on the machines, it turns into a non issue.

And as mentioned above, if you are exclusively producing for yourself, you don't need that much land, hence the people without land are in the right if they demand to get some of it. The very argument you made is that the people with the machines are better stewards of the land, but this logic only makes sense in the presence of them producing for an outside consumer. If they just hold onto the land and do nothing with it, their hypothetical productivity increase is worth nothing compared to the very real zero yield they produce by doing nothing. Even an inefficient production process has higher absolute productivity than doing nothing.

Take it one step further. From the perspective of the low productivity producers the land is very valuable and from the perspective of the high productivity autark producer, the land is worth very little. If the autark producer wants to role play a feudalist and puts an army of killer robots there, he would be expending a lot of resources for something that the producer doesn't consider valuable. Since the low productivity producers consider the land more valuable, their military budget per acre is actually higher.

So now the second underlying assumption is that the landless people are defeated by the robot army of the landed people. I hope you see where this is going. It's not about economics at this point anymore. It's some weird power fantasy where some group of people always wins and another group of people always loses.

adrianN• 1 month ago

Figuring out what to produce and how to allocate resources are algorithmically hard problems, even if you know people’s valuation functions. Without some kind of market mechanism to partially reveal valuations it is very difficult indeed. AI is not magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle on your problems to make them go away.

jameslk11• 1 month ago

But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

In other words, a planned economy

bellowsgulch• 1 month ago

Always impressive how smoothly complex constraints vanish in these models.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 month ago

AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

AI could also be able to figure out how much to produce and how to limit waste in a way that leaves you to starve. And there won't be anything you can do about it. And this solution would, it turns out, suit the people who still have influence in how the system works just fine.

ou and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.

But what would you even trade? Do you have anything that a starving unemployed man who bargain for? And does he have anything you want?

tsunamifury• 1 month ago

It’s amazing seeing so many people reconstruct socialism and technocratic communism of the 60s from base principles and completely be ignorant of everything we learned about it.

starbugs• 1 month ago

But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

Might want to think that through again. I recommend this SG Atlantis episode: https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Poisoning_the_Well

numpad0• 1 month ago

You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.

And that's communist. I don't understand why nobody seem to see the irony or the miscategorization. This isn't to be critical of this comment, but my righteousness obsessed mind says that people pushing for the dual-layer system where few controls classical economy without humans and rest using their own systems needs to be relabeled from capitalist to proto-Soviet style totalitarian anarcho-Communist.

chadgpt34• 1 month ago

You need land to do anything, even just to exist.

ares6233• 1 month ago

Look at this discussion. All this so a bunch of nerds can be allowed to play with their newest toy.

Unit327• 1 month ago

"If agi and perfect humanoid robot slaves, then xyz". That's a motherfucking big "if".

ACCount37• 1 month ago

More of a "when" nowadays.

jameslk11• 1 month ago

This discussion thread is so full of slippery slope fallacies and plot holes it’s so hard to take seriously. I think it’s safe to say nobody knows for sure how AI will exactly change the economy in the long term. Humans are complex and often unpredictably irrational (see also: behavioral economics), let alone stacking on assumptions about how technology might progress. It might as well be noise

It’s fun to speculate on a sci-fi level, but I don’t think the long term endgame is worth losing any sleep over yet

beloch• 1 month ago

"Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them."

----------------

This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.

To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?

pixl9710• 1 month ago

Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.

OutOfHere• 1 month ago

We need an Amazon for AIs whereby AIs can order other AIs to do particular work for a particular fee, then retrieve the work product, and rate the worker. The worker doesn't have to be limited to AI agents; it can also be a human agent or an any entity. The work can be digital or physical.

iwintermute• 1 month ago

Pointless economy? Technically Possible!

ojbyrne• 1 month ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune%3A_The_Butlerian_Jihad

TheWrongGuy• 1 month ago

This author, like many before him, have decided that their lack of comprehension of a concept (in this case, money) is somehow proof that it can't be understood.

protocolture• 1 month ago

This article is exactly as annoying as politicians who ascribe everything to the Economy.

caconym_• 1 month ago

Seems like a fairly long winded and poorly written article to state the obvious: that you can in principle have one really rich guy enjoying a lifestyle similar to what he might enjoy today as a billionaire/trillionaire, except that instead of being sustained by production from an economy reliant on human labor, he has a robot factory/farm/etc. that makes everything he needs and wants. And at that point, of course, everybody else becomes an inconvenience (at best).

I don't really understand the comments (apparently) denying the basic logic of this scenario (maybe the article is so confusing that they, or I, am wrong about what it's trying to say). IMO the only real question is how close current technology is to achieving this scenario.

Joel_Mckay• 1 month ago

The top LLM "AI" models were put in a simulated economy, and it showed the most successful models ended up destroying the productivity of the fiscal ecosystem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUekLTqV1ME

"If not [cult], why [cult] shaped?" lol =3

mordae2• 1 month ago

Money is an example. Really, what is money? A piece of paper? Some metal? Some number on a computer? Could you put your finger on what money really is, especially in the modern world?

Debt owed to central bank. Enforced by State via taxation and confiscation of property if you do not pay up. People seek it because they need to pay the said taxes and/or believe other people will seek it to pay theirs, including in a foreign territory. Loses value when central bank/State is unable to impose taxation and/or has not much useful work to extract from its subjects.

Recently western States have been captured by socialists, which prompted a reaction of the rich and powerful that eventually made the States unable to issue money and forced them to beg for the very thing they enable on the door fronts of the capitalists, making democracy a second-class economical citizen.

euehe• 1 month ago

“ Debt owed to central bank”

Wrong.

Many of the comments here on economics and finance are so wrong it’s actually hilarious. I need to go wipe my brain clean after reading some of these.

What’s next - fractional reserve banking? Also wrong

adalacelove• 1 month ago

Why have the powerful not completely killed the rest of the people?

A. Ethics/Morals B. Power balance C. People are a valuable resource

I think we are all a little concerned it is C.

It's a grim thought and I'm optimistic, but the stakes are very high. Reminds me of Solaria (Foundation and Earth, Asimov).

kart23• 1 month ago

the economy sucks. the fact that cars cost 30k. the fact that morrocco has high speed rail and california doesn’t. the fact that practically no new housing gets built in san francisco.

the economy needs to get a whole lot better before i would even consider something like this looking true. human demands are wildly elastic, which is why we’re not all farmers riding around in horse drawn carriages still.

Nevermark• 1 month ago

We already see this happening.

As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down.

The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy.

This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune.

Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No.

There

HeartStrings• 1 month ago

Pitchforks

giacomoforte• 1 month ago

What I do not find plausible is this scenario where AI is so smart it can replace us all, but at the same time somehow still easily controllable and utterly subservient to the ownership class.

dominicrose2• 1 month ago

It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it? Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high.

A leap of faith is required and sometimes things don't happen the way we expect but it's better than aiming for nothing.

moffkalast• 1 month ago

That's the neat part, you don't. At least as far as the younger generations is concerned there is no future for us, even if you don't include climate change. Laying flat / quiet quitting, etc. movements are not accidental.

ffsm8• 1 month ago

Laying flat is completely different though.

It's the realization in china that their efforts will never amount to meaningful rewards, hence they scale down the effort to what's absolutely necessary for survival. Living without a home and only working maybe 1 day a week to get enough food to not die. Equivalent in Europe would be to just be homeless and get by on social security, US probably getting by on food stamps.

What you see here is subtly different: they see the sword of damocles. Whatever they may do, the end may come at any point and they have no way to influence it.

But to go back to the initial question of what to do: you ignore it. You cannot do anything about it, hence you can only gamble that it doesn't manifest and work under that assumption. If it does manifest youre fucked anyway. But if it doesn't, you're gucci

soco• 1 month ago

Where is this obsession with predicting the future comping from? Did humanity ever predict the future?`Yet it somehow thrived, brought us here and enabled us to complain about the lack of fortune-telling.

trolleski5• 1 month ago

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 prison sentence for throwing a brick at a cop.

malfist• 1 month ago

Who is "they" in your story?

_DeadFred_• 1 month ago

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.

cheesecakegood• 1 month ago

If I've observed anything about humanity, it's that feeling out of control or that we are subject to randomness is something we absolutely hate, both on an individual and societal level. The easiest way out of it is to conclude that randomness is either a lie or a conspiracy, rather than accept the harder truth.

A thousand years ago, humans believed that natural disasters could be predicted by augurs, portents, etc. not out of a rational understanding, but out of an innate sense that "it can't possibly be random". It's reverse reasoning at its core.

Today, the same instincts are alive and kicking, but the current fad is to blame the ultra rich instead.

andyferris• 1 month ago

It always required a leap of faith - that’s the point of life, getting married and having kids.

Not so many generations ago parents might not know if they’d survive to see their children reach adulthood (or if their children would survive, or if they’d be infertile, or die during childbirth). My parents are boomers who ended up doing well, but had to buy a house at a 17% interest rate and low wages not knowing if that was a smart or dumb move. The current generation face huge land values (but have better medicine and moderate interest rates). Who would you trade places with, without the benefit of hindsight?

doctorwho428• 1 month ago

Someone in my career in the 1950's... In a heart beat, even if I didn't know what was coming next.

High taxes lead to reinvestment.

chrsw• 1 month ago

There are enough people in the same boat that I would think the future would tend to support families, maybe with a bit of struggle, above all else. No matter how good computers get at devaluing labor or how expensive housing gets, kids still need to eat, learn and grow.

monerochan• 1 month ago

Just because there is a need does not mean it will be fufilled

everyday7732• 1 month ago

A need does not get filled simply because it exists. If society is no longer necessary and participating within the economy then society can't provide a safety net for kids.

It's like walking in the desert assuming you will reach water soon because you are really thirsty. Nature doesn't care about human needs and will allow you to die of thirst.

abyssin• 1 month ago

Seeing the number of poor people in the world, I don't understand what makes you believe you couldn't be one of them. Their kids also need to eat, learn and grow.

otikik5• 1 month ago

Well, imagine being able to actually predict the future. It would suck. There would always be an optimal choice all of the time. You would be a slave to your prescience.

The only way free will is possible is that we are oblivious to the future.

Good luck with your choices, and your life!

dainank• 1 month ago

Dune Messiah in a nutshell.

doctorwho428• 1 month ago

Sooooo...

We are doomed because we can predict the sun will rise tomorrow?

We are doomed because we can predict the weather 7-10 days out with reasonable accuracy?

We are doomed because we can predict the climate change based on models?

We are doomed because with our knowledge of physics we can predict the outcome of many events?

erikerikson• 1 month ago

Being determined doesn't require awareness.

lqet• 1 month ago

Yes, predicting the future was never possible. In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak. Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children and live life through the great plague, through middle ages in which most of the population expected the apocalypse to be just around the corner, the 30 years war with up to 70% of the population dead in some areas, two world wars, a time in which nuclear annihilation of mankind seemed just one false push of a button away, and a time when large parts of Europe were covered in radioactive substances following the Chernobyl disaster.

End times are nothing new, it's the historic default mode.

mothballed6• 1 month ago

A lot of those people were able to do it without debt which made it far less precarious. I have equally pessimistic view of the future so I built my house one piece of wood at a time with cash. I bought a piece of shit car with cash. I've never used debt, I just got all the things I have by buying shit cars and shit land and slowly slowly making things better until I have nice things.

For much of the youth, this is impossible. The permitting and regulatory process for houses is hostile to slow and DIY building so even if you can get cheap land near jobs (you can) you can't do it without predicting 30 years of mortgage payments. The pandemic monetary policy (more recently) and cash-for-clunkers(longer ago) trashed the used car markets. Increased regulation, licensing, insurance requirements and liability made childcare far less affordable. Also in the old days "neglect" was stuff like actually starving your kids to death so if you were broke you could work or do domestic stuff to save money and leave them home or to run around outside without Karen having them snatched by CPS.

Annihilation isn't so worrying, it's the surviving that's scary.

golddust-gecko• 1 month ago

Yet I am immensely grateful that my ancestors chose to build homes and marry and have children

I think this premise is questionable. I double that choice had much to do with it, for most of our ancestors. In particular a large fraction of children (majority?) born were not born out the free choice of the parents, but rather as a result of accident, social pressure/expectation, economic necessity etc.

Given a free choice, the same uncertain and/or bleak future produces the rational outcome that it does not seem prudent to have children.

InsideOutSanta• 1 month ago

In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak

In the past, this was a reason to have children, because you needed somebody to help out and look after you when you were old. Now, it's a reason not to have children, because you're putting people into a world knowing that there is a non-trivial probability that they will suffer all their lives through wars, famine, social unrest, and other man-made disasters.

thatfrenchguy• 1 month ago

Folks did not have kids during WW1 though: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalité_en_France#/media/Fich... :)

palmotea2• 1 month ago

Yes, predicting the future was never possible.

True, but...

In fact, for most of the time in human history, the future looked incredibly bleak.

No, the rate of change was slow enough that you could probably make a good-enough prediction: your life would be similar to that of your father's or grandfathers'.

The problem is that nowadays, some foolish technology-worshiping assholes have pushed the rate of change faster than almost anyone can handle: before we've started to learn to deal with the problems of one technology, another technology disrupts everything again. Society needs to operate at a human scale, and a human speed, or it will kill itself.

bluejay2387• 1 month ago

"End times are nothing new, it's the historic default mode." -- might be the smartest thing I have read in many weeks.

skybrian6• 1 month ago

It seems like if real estate becomes a more uncertain investment, it has more to do with climate change than AI.

chaseadam17• 1 month ago

No one could ever predict anything and we're all going to die.

icefrog98• 1 month ago

The fun part is we can believe AI will generate boatloads of cash and require no additional cash, and financial history will come to an end. But the future is not set in stone. Simplistic, naive and even optimistic and maximalist thoughts about AI are in the end just guesses.

hoppp• 1 month ago

Just be a genetic machine and do your thing. Our ancestors can evolve into more primitive forms and technically we will live on.

When it stops being evolutionarily beneficial to be intelligent because the machines do the thinking then it will happen. Can't do anything about it

tencentshill• 1 month ago

When enough people are no longer willing to make the leap, the market cools, and incentives appear to heat it back up. Perfect balance is always achieved. In a libertarian dream world.

holoduke• 1 month ago

One should live and enjoy today. Way too many people live in the future. Only to find out it never becomes reality. Today is reality.

refurb• 1 month ago

How is this any different than it's ever been?

Not making life choices because you're worried they'll turn out bad is a terrible way to approach life.

littlexsparkee5• 1 month ago

You're making a choice to be resilient - doesn't mean you can't pursue the other course down the line but it's self preservation at this point. I don't think it makes sense to give it a moral valence.

bossyTeacher• 1 month ago

Different aims have different risk profiles though? Saving up 3 months to buy a car you can replace in 8 months if it breaks down is very different from deciding to quit your lucrative career to become a low paid artist which is different from giving up 18 years of your life to make a human who might need assistance from you for longer than 18 years and from other people once you die. Mortgages are also a different risk profile.

Aim at something yes. But don't be reckless or overly optimistic.

bcjdjsndon4• 1 month ago

Questions....

- what powers the robots? How is this power source maintained?

- when a robot is damaged, how is it repaired and where do the raw materials come from?

- when a robot simply doesn't work properly, who assesses the issue and resolves it?

- with 99% of the world population presumably starving to death, what is stopping them from overthrowing whoever is starving them to death?

cultofmetatron• 1 month ago

we already have a fleet of autonomous robots composed of protein that solved this problem. its not infeasible for artificially created robots to eventually be able to do this stuff on their own.

bcjdjsndon4• 1 month ago

to eventually be able to do this

Eventually being the key concept here. No doubt we'll automate a bunch of stuff, but not at this pace. The robots aren't good enough yet. General purpose robots are even further away.

For the foreseeable, you will still need wage slaves

muvlon2• 1 month ago

- electricity (from solar, hydro, nuclear, whatever). maintained by robots.

- it is repaired by robots using resources mined or reclaimed by robots.

- you guessed it, robots.

- robots with weapons.

If we actually want to prevent this doomsday scenario, I don't think it's wise to bet on "robots will never be able to do X".

bcjdjsndon4• 1 month ago

- you'll need to invent these robots first, so whats the ETA?

- same as above

- ditto

- a bit skynet, but it will still require humans in the loop. This is the least whacky though as it actually exists

sheepscreek2• 1 month ago

I have been discussing a similar thought experiment in private circles for about 3 years now. It goes like this:

If the world population hits a ceiling (or starts to shrink), and corporations get more massive - reaching every citizen on earth, how can they continue to grow?

Assuming the typical pathways of acquisition/merger have been exhausted. Now you're looking at a world of abundance, and corporations must invent ways to generate demand.

So what if, robots could be state owned and be treated as a special class of robot citizens? They could earn a wage (or some kind of credits) and spend them for benefits like upgrades or repairs. Not just humanoids, all robots. With this, one could essentially create infinite demand-supply channels.

sheepscreek2• 1 month ago

As an extension to this, in this world - most typical things humans need for survival will be made extremely cheap and abundant. Universal income would give every individual the means to afford them. Every person on earth (or at least in certain societies) will be able to live comfortably (not luxuriously, but comfortable - ie. survival becomes commoditized). People would only work to have a purpose.

kakacik3• 1 month ago

We discuss this while half of the world is malnourished, there are entire regions with fanatical religious extremists doing (successfully) all they can to keep those regions in medieval times, and west has no real way to change that.

Its not going to happen in my lifetime, that's sure but its a nice academic what-if discussion.

JimTheMan• 1 month ago

It assumes that people will be meek when they are oppressed. That there won't be a counter movement at all to the rising inequality?

You can already see it now, with the rise of populism and to a lesser extent socialism.

A non-consumption economy will only happen if the masses can be somehow oppressed, or pursuaded to bliss out peacefully.. In the long run of history, I'm going to bet on the masses pulling through.

johnpaulgeorge• 1 month ago

HERE IS A CHANGE PROVIDE A GOOD PRICE FOR OUR DATA. OUR DATA MUST NOT BE FREE. WHEN THEY (ALIENS AND GAYLORDS) EXTRACT OUR DATA PAY. MAKE THEM PAY. DONT TELL ME ECONOMY DOESNOT ALLOW THAT. CHANGE THE ECONOMY THEN.

secult• 1 month ago

Regarding the unstable times: Consider living in any year in the past 50 years or so. There are shocks and game-changing events happening subsequently after each of the year you have possibly chosen. Oil crisis here, war there, collapse of some country, technological breakthrough, etc.. Unless you live in countries, where you don't plan for years, but for months or days upfront. Then your life is much more stereotypical, when you just try to survive every day.

imtringued3• 1 month ago

Honestly, this blog is pretty silly and the reason is that the blog author is conflating multiple concepts, while failing to have a grasp of basic aspects of human organization (I honestly am at the point where accusing someone of not having a grasp of basic aspects of economics is a meaningless phrase, since mainstream economics is purely mathematical and is devoid of anything grounded in reality or the history of humanity).

What comes before an economy? Self sufficiency aka autark production and consumption. You produce exactly what you will consume. Note that eliminating "consumption" is illogical, since any elimination of "consumption" by necessity also entails the elimination of "production" and since humans are mortal, abstaining from consumption will lead to death. The same applies to any machine that needs energy or maintenance.

"Peopleless economy?" conflates the idea of machines or AI as economic agents and the idea of the rich withdrawing from the public market, by expanding their autarky.

The fallacy here is that you cannot simultaneously withdraw from the market and dominate it. If the rich decide that AI has advanced far enough that they don't need a single human to work under them anymore and they pack up their stuff and teleport a section of earth to Mars or a space colony, where the non-rich people cannot reach them, those rich people have ceded their influence on Earth.

When you play Factorio you build a fully automated ever expanding factory completely without any other people. There is no market economy here, because there is no trading here.

When you play on a Minecraft server with an automation modpack, most people won't play together. In fact, they will start from scratch, because it is more fun that way.

Those humans are then paid for their services, work, or ideas, and can keep on buying food and housing from the owning class to survive. But guess what: once the machines get the role of producing and conceiving things, those humans are no longer economically necessary.

Again, another fallacy. The humans doing the consumption here are generating the reason for the machines' existence. If you unemploy the consumers, you unemploy the producers, even if the producer is a machine. Now that the rich own a huge pile of machines that they don't need, they will get rid of them and downsize their factory to just what they need for themselves. They will retreat into an autark mode of production.

There's just one issue. People can still exist in the old "obsolete" non-autark mode of production at the loss of productivity. If there are people who need food and the old producers have left the market, new low productivity producers will enter the market to replace them. Hence, the autark mode of production is inherently a cessation of power.

Now the obvious counter argument is that society can devolve back into feudalism where everyone is fighting over land and resources and the only thing that changed is that the peasant class was merely substituted by robots, but this is a completely different topic from what the blog post addresses. "The Economy" in the blog is about trading/employment, not about whose name is written in the land registry for a given plot of land or that there are standing robot armies re-enacting robot feudalism.

Our world is so perverse, that it should not be impossible for you to imagine that after AI taking over, The Economy relies entirely on virtual transactions between companies with no product or service, that the 'consumption' only refers to powering the AI machines, and everyone else is homeless or dead.

Yet another fallacy. Companies can do useless transactions between each other if they want to for the sake of role playing, but why would they? They can downsize and stop producing things. The blog post here is actually committing the very thing it claims to argue against. It imagines a future that is exactly the same, except for the one thing that is changing. So the blog is critiquing itself for its lack of imagination.

The implicit assumptions that lead to the conclusion that we are needed for The Economy to keep running, are erroneous. So are most conclusions about The Economy, even when they come from experts: ask ten economists the same question, and you will get ten different answers or predictions.

At this point it feels like the author has a fundamental misunderstanding what an economy is. Machines are built in response to a demand that makes them necessary. In the absence of demand, the machine is idle but still produces costs, which makes it profitable to get rid of it. If there is a single human on the planet you don't need an elaborate agricultural society, you don't need machines, you don't need to hold onto land, you can just live as a hunter gatherer nomad. If you could have a hyper tech machine that grants you the living standard of today, you still wouldn't need to conquer the entire planet, you would leave it as is.

The biggest failure of this blog post is that it fails to actually address the disequilibrium factors. The position it fights against is actually completely logical in an assumed "always in equilibrium" economy. It doesn't mention land as a non-reproducable factor that must be divided among the population or money as a monopoly that you are obligated to use for trading despite its ability to be accumulated. Those two factors can disrupt or are immune to equilibrium, but in both cases if there was a way to build your own substitute land or substitute money, there wouldn't be any problem.

In fact, you could say that the fundamental problem is that wildly different people are sharing the same planet. If every human had their own planet, none of the raised issues would exist.

vinaigrette• 1 month ago

Some of the points you are making are great. I would however argue that a small group of people trading is still an economy albeit a shrunk one. But what I believe the point the author is making is the following : consumption based economy isn't required to an economy. In some aspect, I believe that it is false : we are *required* to have a bunch of strictly unnecessary stuff to survival (cellphones and data plans being one example) to be considered as a functionnal human being (pretty much everywhere in the planet at that). I also believe that he points out something that is true however : most people have been unable to partake in consumption society (see Lewis' 1954 article on unlimited supply of labor) for a long time. This, and chronic unemployement that appeared in the 70's, showed that a 2 speed economy is possible, even preferable for the capitalists ; and what was limited to the global south at Lewis' time (though some more recent historical work tend to disagree) is happening in the North. My conclusion would be that the acceleration of inequalities to the point of "uneconomicness" of a large part of the population is what the author points out to be a "peopleless economy". I personnaly found the article to be stimulating, even with its many shortcuts. What I make of your points are less a contradiction but a optimistic point of view of the situation : secession of the capitalists mean freedom for the rest. But empirical observation show that ressources being limited (although standalone freedom being unacceptable as well for them), auto-organization is confronted with the armed forces mentionned in the article.

Also, enterprises trading capital endlessly isn't exactly what is happening with the ai (alledged) bubble ?

bmacho3• 1 month ago

The future I see is that the Rich won't need people and they will have the means to defend themselves.

In the last 1-2 years I see more and more people mentioning guillotines, but I think very soon that won't be an opion anymore.

The Rich will be able to leave the mainlands, protect themselves, and let everyone else be controlled by robot police, and suffer. Maybe if there's something the Rich absolutely need from the mainlands (what?) then they can let everyone else compete with each other to serve the Rich to ease their shitty life a little.

In the past such societies needed a lot of people to serve the Rich, and to oppress everyone else, and it wasn't that sustainable, revolutions could happen. Very soon the Rich won't need anyone in this system, they will own the means of production by robots (no strikes), and the means of oppression, also by robots.

This is what I see when I look ahead. (BTW the US picking fights when they are the bad guys will result US companies necessarily having to turn to private/robot armies to protect "their property".)

Maybe I am wrong and this won't happen even if we do nothing. However I'd feel safer if we started to take away the unimaginable riches from the Rich, and started to empower the government, which is at least in theory controlled by the majority of the citizens.

azan_• 1 month ago

That's the worst type of doomerism. It doesn't pass even the most basic smell test. Do you think rich nowadays need billions of people to serve them?

jongjong2• 1 month ago

Not only is it not impossible, it's precisely where it's heading.

I think even mass-market companies are going to thrive without customers. They don't need customers. The government will start handing out billion dollar contracts to these companies for doing almost nothing and they're going to focus on investing and the government money is just going to keep going round and round in circles between all the chosen companies.

swiftcoder• 1 month ago

While I somewhat agree on paper, the reality is that an economy where most of the population can't afford food and shelter, is one where rich folks heads end up on pikes pretty rapidly.

Unless the overlords are willing to implement UBI, they can't realistically cut 50% of the workforce from the economy and survive the transition.

ipython• 1 month ago

Kinda ironic that the blog article about a "peopleless economy" is gated behind a "prove you're human" CAPTCHA from Cloudflare.

cbondurant• 1 month ago

ironic, given the title, that I can't read this article on my main desktop, because cloudflare's bot detection has had me as a false positive for years now. I'm just forever stuck on the cloudflare captcha.

No space for this human here, I guess.

Edit after reading through this on a seperate device that hasn't been banned from most of cloudflare: I think this guy is vastly underestimating the amount of humans that are still in the production loop of almost every supply chain.

Consider the humble through-hole LED. A product that surely has reached near the absolute peak of production line optimization, being an almost purely fungible product who's form factor will never change. They are still manually put together by humans. A sheet of semiconductor diodes is separated with a manually operated machine for human access. the prongs are placed into a jig by hand, so that a semi-automated machine can place each diode onto the correct leg. Then the jig is placed, again by hand, into position for the injection molded plastic dome.

It's not just one long automated pipeline that has a couple of hoppers for raw materials at one end and finished LEDs at the other. real human beings are still involved at every step of the process. If we can't achieve end-to-end automation for something as dead simple as the humble through-hole LED, after almost 50 years of process improvement? Technology will never fully remove the human from the economy.

randusername• 1 month ago

Nobody wants to live in a mining economy. Human slavery, extraordinary taxes, no public infrastructure. Conceivably you only need two roads total: one from the palace to the airport and another from the mine to the docks. Any more and someone might try to build a school.

It seems to me that human quality of life is really tightly coupled to economic systems where there is a high ROI in investing in the public.

This is what spooks me about AI. A slow but observable descent on the continuum from knowledge economy to diamond mine economy. The rust belt metastasizes and oversupply of human laborers is such a problem things get really hunger games about which libraries and universities get their bills paid.

phailhaus• 1 month ago

This is why I get worried about the hatred for income taxes. No, you want the government to want you to be richer. If all they raised was property taxes, then they don't care if you get priced out of your home, as long as someone's buying.

otikik5• 1 month ago

There's no hate for income taxes. There's hate about income taxes not accompanied with wealth taxes.

skybrian6• 1 month ago

This suggests to me more separation into industrial versus residential areas. (Or what is the mining for?)

Historically, mechanized agriculture allowed most people to move to cities, then to suburbs. Industry became globalized and off-shored.

These changes in land use have gone on for a long time. Now we’re getting more solar farms and data centers. Due to Internet shopping, malls close and get converted into residential. There are more warehouses, but shoppers don’t go there.

You could think of it as people being increasingly alienated from where the work is done. The logical conclusion is something like a retirement community where goods and services are delivered where possible and the people who work locally are directly providing services to other people there.

And retirees are people who secured an income through whatever means and don’t have to work anymore. They don’t have to worry about how AI will affect their job.

tartoran• 1 month ago

People may be excluded from the main capital/robot/AI economy, but they still need to eat, shelter themselves, and trade with one another. That produces an economy, even if it is informal or black-market.

Ygg2• 1 month ago

So basically rich people trade amongst themselves while the masses live in squalor? That sounds as either a concept for cyberpunk book or a revolution.

asdff2• 1 month ago

Why would land and water and material be devoted to that by the robot overlords? Just cull the humans.

dweinus• 1 month ago

Human civilization? In this economy?

flerchin• 1 month ago

Yes it is impossible as long as it's one person one vote. If a trillionaire with an army of bots owns everything, people will vote that he does not.

Kuyawa• 1 month ago

For the remaining rulers sharing their slice of the world – once the working class has been replaced by robots – land, food and resources are they key ingredients for the post-capitalist economy.

They can fly in planes built by their robots, in airports controlled by their robots, their luggage carried, their limo to the yacht, the captain, the haute cuisine, (the escort service?), everything can be done by robots off the coast of Monaco.

So for those lucky thousands that will own the world, there will be a few entertainers made of flesh, but also a few fellow rulers that will want to wipe them out to control their share of resources as theirs dwindle. So wars will never end, until the last one.

throwarayes• 1 month ago

Ok if I’m bored I’ll be talking about fun things to do with colleagues. If only for bragging rights, impressing friends, or hacker news upvotes. My time is limited so, I’d need to be careful about how I allocate that resource to projects.

That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.

CMay• 1 month ago

No. There is this fantasy that AI will take over and be our nanny, doling out the perfect communist bread, this time without having to wait in line!

Fortunately, that is nonsense for many reasons, but 3 important ones are: the nature of AI, the nature of humans, evolutionary biology and the international cooperation required to optimize the sharing of resources without humane stakeholders making the decisions.

So, sorry if you're of the Marxist, post-scarcity ultimate equality persuasion. It just so happens that you'll never get the entire world to want to become an amorphous gelatinous blob where all the infrastructural, interpersonal, resource distribution and many other decisions are all handled by robots so you never need to learn or do anything about how it all works.

rglover• 1 month ago

"The economy" is just the word we use for transacting between one another. Whether individuals, or businesses, or a combination.

The economy as it exists in popular culture is just a tool to bludgeon people over the head into acceptance of their pre-determined role/rank in society (and softly "nudge" their decision making in the direction of submission to larger, more wealthy entities/individuals).

It's a Girard-style scapegoat designed to be a target for all of the predictable vitriol and confusion of an unpredictable and unknowable future.

The thing that helped me think less in terms of "oh no the economy is bad, panic" and more so in "okay, what are you going to do about it" was this [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

cyberjerkXX• 1 month ago

Yeah - this blog is delusional. The economy IS people's trade relationships. Consumption doesn't halt it shifts. If AI "replaces jobs" aka makes the job significantly cheaper then people will work on other things that provide value to society.

jazzprogramming• 1 month ago

One thing that always comes to mind when I read articles like this is that, suppose he's right and the economic value of 8 billion people becomes close to zero at some point because of AI or something else:

What will 8 billion people be then doing with their time?

Will they be watching Netflix all day in the future?

Or building their dream castle & kingdom in Minecraft instead of IRL?

jpfromlondon• 1 month ago

everyone is always in such a rush to name (and define) the next sociophilosophical zeitgeist, and always with some etymologically unsound term or phrase, interesting as the content may be, the tagline makes me cringe.

Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

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