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> This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long time ago. No ma

• ravi-delia 6y ago
  I've spent what is likely way too much mental energy wondering about this, and I'm no closer to an answer. Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation? Is it possible to have growth that simply outpaces what a human could possibly consume? Intuitively it seems obvious that there should be something like that, but in the 1800s our growth today would seem like it should be enough.
  • rocmcd 6y ago
    If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading up on dematerialization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics) Modern, first-world society does seem to be reaching some sort of inflection point that might point to a "top" (of physical consumption at least) as we get more efficient and more stuff is moving digital. That's not to say there is really anything conclusive, but it is interesting to think about.
  • ctoth 6y ago
    Read some Culture novels.
    • ravi-delia 6y ago
      Oh man, I'd love to but there aren't any more. Fantastic concept, solid execution.
  • wmf 6y ago
    I think it's a good sign that per-capita energy consumption is decreasing in the US; there are limits to consumption.
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      Does that take into account the energy needed to produce what Americans consume?
      • ravi-delia 6y ago
        Yes, that's almost all of per-capita energy consumption. It would be a really dumb metric otherwise.
        • sudosysgen 6y ago
          It is a pretty dumb metric actually, and IIRC it doesn't actually include the energy needed to produce goods that are imported.
  • joe_the_user 6y ago
    The question isn't lifestyle in the abstract. Everything that people buy today is specifically intended to impel more buying. Whether that's cars, houses or sugary foods. The situation is incredibly different than simple "everyone gets what they need" society. Take a look at just about any book on consumerism
    • ravi-delia 6y ago
      But again, it seems like there are physical limits to how much people can consume. Like, we can agree that if everyone had a machine that could magically summon up to 10 thousand cubic meters of material every day, we realistically would have universal material abundance. Even if we exceeded what the boxes could make, one or two dedicated to making more would result in runaway exponential growth that would speed up much faster than human consumption could. Obviously that's the extreme case, and the question is how close to universal replicators do you need to come before people can't want more things fast enough.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        Then people would create television shows demonstrating innovative ways go waste 10,000 cubic meters of material every day. I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded.
        • ravi-delia 6y ago
          > I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded I kind of am? Besides, people don't need to never be stupid again, they just need to become stupider at a slower rate than productivity increases. If hour by hour production significantly increased, how could people possibly waste enough? More importantly, would they? We waste resources to signal wealth. Wasting an ever greater proportion of your allocated geyser of materials doesn't signal anything.
      • visarga 6y ago
        > how close to universal replicators do you need to come We'll probably reach technological self-replication singularity before AGI. I envision a small self replicating/repairing/transforming factory that could function based on local resources. Mostly 3d-printers, robots and tools for making tools. But I think in reality there will be limited resources, energy and pollution we can all use, so we can't have our exponential utopia. Technology will be more like biology, and it will get good at recycling anything.
  • bawolff 6y ago
    There's certainly people who eschew technology and live in a historical fashion. They might even be happier for it. If there is a natural (not physical out of resources) limit where humans feel satiated i doubt we're anywhere near it. If we do hit it, wait a bunch of generations and they'll be more humans.
    • ravi-delia 6y ago
      With exponential growth, we might be closer than you'd think. Clearly people always want more, but the rate at which we want more seems like it has to have to have a limit. At the very least, it can grow faster than the population can (almost automatically, since more people increase growth as well).
  • heleninboodler 6y ago
    > Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation? If there is, it's somewhere beyond launching sports cars into orbit.
    • ravi-delia 6y ago
      See that's exactly the thing. We can point to excess today and say "How could that be sustainable" but it seems like the novelty would wear off, no? Like in some hypothetical future where resources are 1000x more available, would people launch 1000 cars into space? It seems unlikely. Somehow I feel like there is some inelasticity to consumption that we just haven't reached yet. I'm not quite sure why I feel like that though.
      • michael1999 6y ago
        Ever watch someone burn $500 in gas running a boat for an afternoon?
        • eggsmediumrare 6y ago
          Yes. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the feeling of self-righteous rage that comes with it.
    • Aunche 6y ago
      I don't think launching sports cars into orbit is inherently any more wasteful than say the development of the Deep Blue chess computer. It may have been a vanity project, but the ultimate goal was to test a proof of concept.
      • heleninboodler 6y ago
        I didn't say it was wasteful or make any judgments about it. It's just a fact that a level of lifestyle that allows a person to launch his personal sports car into space has been achieved.
        • 6y ago
  • gnramires 6y ago
    I've also spent mental energy on this, about 4-5 years, and recently I've been reaching a conclusion (in a great walkabout about AI, ethics, and the meaning of everything). My conclusion: individual satisfaction is bounded, as long as we have bounded brains. First I should mention that the best principle I've found to underlie life is that we should maximize or optimize some kind of experience of consciousness, for every conscious entity. It's hard to define precisely what that entails, but we have quite good intuition: your life should be rich in activity, in interaction with others, in learning, in thought, in seeing, hearing, thinking; of course, not so rich as to be overwhelming and collapse the whole thing or leave us unable to digest or grasp or understand (at least a part of) what we're experiencing. I don't claim to be completely original: Wilheim von Humboldt for me is one of the great thinkers of conscious motivation (he lived in the 18th century). "I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves." -- WvH Being clear: what matters is not the experiences themselves, i.e. the input/output, but what the various consciousness apprehend. What goes on in your brain. It doesn't matter you're at the most beautiful beach in the most beautiful sunset behaving joyfully and peacefully if internally you're depressed or in despair. "The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." -- WvH You can only make an individual so complete, so harmonious with itself. Our brains have about 100 billion neurons, i.e. a finite number, and there's only so much you can activate those connections. Really the goal is not with any single individual -- our goal should be with every conscious being. That's why we should not plan individually, we should plan as a society. A billionaire can only get so happy -- he can keep linearly stacking jet skis and race cars and yatchs but his happiness won't follow (linearly). We should realize we are all part of a society, as a whole, and ideally be completely indifferent among individuals (i.e. everyone deserves as much happiness as we can collectively get them). In other words, we should take the Golden Rule literally. (of course, in practice, not everyone can be responsible for every other individual, but it should be our ultimate guiding principle, really, as individuals and society, unmistakably): every conscious being has the same value to yourself as yourself. Because individual satisfaction is bounded, this allows maximizing the practically unbounded (because of almost unbounded entity numbers) satisfaction of society as a whole, currently about 8 billion individuals. We need to move past egoism. I don't think an egoistical civilization, as was Western Society for much of the 20th century, can reliably go much further than we've come (see: climate change, rising political instability, fluctuating inequality, stagnating quality of life). I'm not arguing for any political system, I'm arguing for a cultural-social-technological outlook of the entire society. I'd label it 'Universalism' (but that's taken), so perhaps 'Conscious Universalism', or 'Concious value universalism'. That's how we move our entire civilization forward, achieve better political stability, how we're able to tackle mega projects like engineering the climate and rethinking our global supply chain, how we can allocate massive resources to space exploration, space colonization, prevention of extinction events (like asteroid impacts, etc.), how we move definitely past threat of nuclear annihilation (a nuclear conflict, still not completely out of imagination, could perhaps still collapse society). How to do it? I think part of it is simply enlightenment, discussion, writing and reading; the other is indeed recreating our institutions, including our economic and political systems (focused around this goal). This century is when we decide whether we become the Borg or the Federation. Cylon or Human. Dalek or Doctor. (or just slowly collapse... hopefully not; we have potential)
  • birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
    Why should there be a limit? If you can command robots to build anything you can ever imagine, who doesn't want his own Versailles - with impressive towers like the Burj Khalifa? Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back? And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since everything is very efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor humans.
    • mlac 6y ago
      I don’t. There is the consideration that more money comes with more problems. You can say that more money would fix those problems, but at the end of the day, you still had to spend energy thinking about it. You can quickly approach a situation where time is the limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don’t really have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good example: he’s got a few projects that he really cares about and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented than he is. And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage and negative externalities on others that can wind you up like Marie-Antoinette. Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren’t minimalists.
      • eggsmediumrare 6y ago
        I agree. All I want is peace. Time with my family and friends, a garden, time to read, that kind of thing. Why anyone bothers with loud cars or big houses with huge lawns is beyond me.
    • jodrellblank 6y ago
      I don't; one can only drive one car at a time, one can only be in one room at a time, one can only eat one stomach full of food in a given period, one can only read/watch/experience at most 24 hours of media in a day. Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously. What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do? How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring. > "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?" OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life? Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?
  • DenisM 6y ago
    Status is a big deal. A wealth differential allows one to order other people around, building up status. Those others then feel the need to get out from under the yoke, or at least to be in the position to order around other-other people. All of this requires continuous wealth accumulation to which there is no limit. You would have to redefine status to end this game.
    • est31 6y ago
      Also note that a situation where humanity's productivity is expanding is way better from a social standpoint than one where it is stagnant. The first allows positive sum games to exist. The second is a zero sum game. Of course there is a limit to growth as the reachable universe is finite.
      • sudosysgen 6y ago
        If the goal of wealth accumulation is not actually to be better off but to be better than your neighbour (as it is), then positive sum games become zero sum games functionally. So no, that's not really a solution either. But even then, the goal isn't to limit human productivity, is it? It's to limit how much we work and lifestyle inflation, which doesn't require growth to go to zero.
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      "A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain."
      • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        We’ve shifted the goalposts from “providing every human the dignity of a home” to “providing every human a home that doesn’t look too shabby when compared to the highest bar in society”
  • visarga 6y ago
    > Is it possible to have growth that simply outpaces what a human could possibly consume? We're already maxed out on information, tools, media and interactions.
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    People can't all reliably afford food and shelter, so I don't think lifestyle inflation is the real problem.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      Overpopulation is a problem. People will claim that the plant can support 20 billion+ people but they conveniently forget that these people will have an incredibly low standard of living. Even if we were to assume that an arbitrarily low standard of living is acceptable, at some point that standard of living will include mass starvation and death so there is a real capacity limit. Being well below that limit is a virtue.
      • ravi-delia 6y ago
        That I'm definitely not convinced of. With current levels of technology, poverty in a global setting has more to due with infrastructure and unrest than it does actual shortages. I suspect that we could pack on even more people with the industrialization of the third world, vastly increasing productivity. More importantly, there's absolutely no reason to think that technology will somehow stop pushing the carrying capacity further. More people will yield more innovation, yielding more growth, yielding more people. If there's an endpoint to that, I doubt we'll see it any time soon. Yes, I too see how insane it is to think that sometime relatively soon global GDP will double twice in a year. But twice in a decade would be just as crazy 500 years ago.
  • bob33212 6y ago
    Yes, There are a lot of people who make more money than they care to spend. Some of those people give the money away. and also No, when Larry Ellison built a 200 foot yacht, a Russian oligarch built a 250 foot yacht, The next guy will build a 300 foot yacht, etc.
    • eggsmediumrare 6y ago
      Pardon my English, but fuck Larry Ellison, the Russian oligarch, and the next guy.
  • scythe 6y ago
    >Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation? There ought to be a point at which continuing increases in income fail to generate increases in either life expectancy or the proportion of adults who are able to work (not necessarily working). It would be necessary to distinguish this from the effects of anti-aging technology, but it should be possible in principle; improving diet/sleep/exercise and reducing pollution exposure isn't "anti-aging technology", nor are childcare/education.
• fnord77 6y ago
  the wealth-hoarders are interfering with this...
  • missedthecue 6y ago
    How does one hoard wealth? Am I made poorer because Bezos owns 9% of his own company?
    • AlexandrB 6y ago
      His workers are poorer because his company's enormous valuation comes from the surplus value they produce but do not receive as compensation. You might be poorer if you own a small business those workers would frequent if they had more money. Edit: You might also be poorer if you tried to compete with Amazon and were crushed like a bug by their anti-competitive practices.
      • colinmhayes 6y ago
        Labor theory of value lmao. Amazon workers are richer because they've been given an opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have. If they could have a better job they'd take it.
        • fnord77 6y ago
          trickle down economics!
      • imtringued 6y ago
        Wrong mode of thinking. The problem is that there aren't enough alternatives. If you want an economy that is fair for workers then you need more jobs per worker so the worker can choose the best offer. That also means you want more employers, including the Jeff Bezos types.
        • eggsmediumrare 6y ago
          Would this not apply to industries with lots of competition like restaurants or hotels?
• mattnewton 6y ago
  What ai wil change though is the ability of large categories of labour to win what they need on an open marketplace. I think this initiative is trying to anticipate that.
• pharmakom 6y ago
  yep... expectations scale with wealth. if we set a standard of living around that of ~100 years ago there would be "enough" for all. more likely outcome is that wealth disparity remains about the same (or gets worse) but everyone is a bit better off
• ksdale 6y ago
  The GDP per capita of the world is only about $12,000. That's technically "what we need," food, clothes, and shelter for a family of 4, but on a per person basis, it's below the federal poverty line in the US. I don't think it's correct to say that we had enough wealth a long time ago. There are a lot of places in the world that are still desperately poor by any measure, not just by the standards of the wealthy. And although it's undoubtedly true that the wealthiest few deciles could give up many luxuries to provide more for the poor, it's much more arguable if there is enough for everyone to have enough without generating much more.
  • randyrand 6y ago
    I’ve been watching videos about tribes in Papa New Guniea and it makes you realize you don’t need very much for clothes or shelter. Food is all you really need. For luxury: food, sex, and purpose. The tribes have all 3.
    • fastball 6y ago
      You should probably move out there then.
      • dudeman13 6y ago
        Need Want
        • fastball 6y ago
          GC claimed that food is all that is needed, and that their wants were satisfied by the additional of the other two things. The fact is that the average human is not actually content to be one notch above animal with "food, sex, and purpose". That is why we have progressed much further than just accepting those basics as all we need. But I think our improvements on those things do provide enough value for the average person to be happy. - Tasty food - Safe sex (and relative ease of reproduction) - Multi-variate / chosen purpose. Plus other methods to remove annoying friction from your life: - Optimized shelter - Optimized travel - Consumption of various raw goods (not for food and not for shelter). e.g. 3D Printers!
• victor106 6y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. People might still be more unhappy even though society at large delivers them things that could be unimaginable today. The creators and owners who can deliver that future will be richer than everyone else (rightfully so, imo) and that divide is what I think could make people more unhappy although they will be much better off than what we are today.
• abraxas 6y ago
  I doubt that. People who are ultra rich use money as a proxy for power, influence and status. In a post scarcity world money likely won't be a great way to attain status so the hope is that status will be obtained through other means like creative expression or charisma.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  "This revolution will erode enough biome for every human to be dependent on the industrial complex to survive, while animals are basically left to starve."
• tobmlt 6y ago
  Human wants for things are endless. Human desire for extra time, even more so. Human needs are subjective to each and every human. Why does Bezos get up in the morning?, if you’d like something aphoristic you may reply to in many creative ways. There is a lot of hubris in saying we’re pretty much maxed out now, thanks and time to stop. I’d suggest instead we need to make smart choices, and that usually smart answers are not found at the far extremities. This “we have all we need” bit reminds me of scientists saying physics was over in the 19th century, combined with a bit of Thomas Malthus in such a way that we all die unless we halt innovation. It reminds me of that, but I’d be overstepping to put those words in your mouth. After all human intention has endless range to match the rest.
  • tomgp 6y ago
    >Human needs are subjective to each and every human After a certain point that's true but I think you miss the point of the parent. There are many, many hungry people in the world, many people without shelter and further millions who have no access to healthcare education or even clean water. These are not subjective needs. Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide health care and education for each and every one of them.
    • tobmlt 6y ago
      Ah, thanks. I felt that was a separate point to the idea of stopping progress because we have enough. I didn’t realize that was the main point? Yes indeed, we have enough to ease those burdens and it’s a terrible thing that they continue!
    • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide health care and education for each and every one of them. I don’t think this is really true, part of the problem is that the wealth that you think could be allocated to this problem was only generated by incentivizing people to build it with compensation, if you turned around and took it away from the people who built it and gave it to people who did not build it, you would disincentivize creation of more wealth, and the wealth you reappropriated would deteriorate, because you neglected to create an incentive and maintenance infrastructure to keep it working. This is exactly what happened when we tried this, starting with poor people in our own communities. Public housing projects and welfare programs are money sinks that are notoriously counterproductive at meeting their stated needs; and we can’t get people to consider the structural imbalances that result because the need for these programs is an article of faith and among the believers the only acceptable reasons for their failure are “people who don’t agree with the program” and “lack of funding.”
• franciscop 6y ago
  That's why the article goes on to explain how to fix that. I believe they are two independent points, the taxation proposition is independent from the AI revolution and could be applied today. What the article argues is that the AI revolution would make wealth accumulation so massive that we will need laws and taxes, and new ways of looking at the world.
• stickfigure 6y ago
  > We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long time ago. That's obviously not true today: There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around. There almost certainly will be enough eventually, but human beings live in the now. There will be another pandemic someday. Or some other natural disaster that creates localized or temporal scarcity. We can't just spin up a new lifesaving drug or a million new homes overnight. Maybe someday we will?
  • Viliam1234 6y ago
    > There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around. That is mostly a question of regulations. The part that takes so much time is getting the vaccines approved; many researchers don't even try because they know they wouldn't have enough money to get their vaccine approved. Also, most governments negotiate hard to reduce the prices, despite the fact that economic damage from lockdowns is much greater. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfried_St%C3%B6cker https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfried_St%C3%B6cker