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- Hacker News
- 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.
by whatever1 - 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.by AngryData
- > 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?
by jameslk - 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.by dyauspitr
- 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.
by BobbyTables2 - 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.
- 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.
by baron816 - 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.by 2001zhaozhao
- 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
by moomoo11 - Paraphrasing Nate Hagens, at the end of the day the modern economy just turns megalitres of oil into microlitres of dopamineby jordwest
- You just described the plot of Alien: Earth!by jzig
- 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.
by kart23 - 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.
by codexon - 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.
by YZF - Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing upby __s
- 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.
- 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.
by dodu_ - Sounds terribleby ethersteeds
- 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
- 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?
by mawadev - Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?by xg15
- 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.
by coderenegade - 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.
by baron816 - >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?
- You need land to do anything, even just to exist.by chadgpt3
- > 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
by starbugs - Always impressive how smoothly complex constraints vanish in these models.by bellowsgulch
- 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"
by ares623 - 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.by adrianN
- > 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
by jameslk