6 ms·
I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. We could end up in a world where 99.99% of people are re
by janalsncm 3y ago
I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. We could end up in a world where 99.99% of people are redundant and useless cost centers for our GDP maximizing economic paradigm. In that case, you don’t need killer robots in order to push humanity towards near-extinction. The invisible hand will smite them.
But don’t worry, TED Talk attendee. The obsoletariat mostly won’t be Americans. The median member of this class will probably be Chinese or Indian. So you can continue your performative concerns about Roko’s Basillisk or whatever topic of distant, paralyzing uncertainty is overflowing from the next room into mine.
- ke88y 3y agoMaybe this is why billionaires and hundred-millionaires are the ones so concerned about existential risk. A collapse of consensus in our current and historically not-that-old system of property rights is an existential risk -- to them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- __loam 3y agoThis is a problem with capitalism in general, not just with AI.
- version_five 3y agoWe're seeing this happen a lot with "AI" - now that it's a super popular topic people use it as the lens though which they project their general political grievances. It gets more attention.
- janalsncm 3y agoWell, it’s a problem with any economic system which uses labor as a proxy for value/rights. If my political power is predicated on my ability to withdraw labor or move to a new country, it’s not going to be good for me when my services are no longer required.
- atq2119 3y agoReminds me of the point made by Ted Chiang that (roughly, from memory) when people express fear of technology, quite often what they really fear is capitalism and how it will use the technology. This goes back all the way to the Luddites, who weren't actually anti-technology/progress. They were opposed to how its benefits were captured and by whom.
- sdwr 3y agoThere's at least 3 prongs there. PvP - someone will use it against me PvE - someone will do it better than me and EvP - it will take something away from our human experience None of those really capture the weight of tradition though. Loss of control is a hard pill to swallow. Feels better to keep on doing the old thing that kinda works, instead of the new unknown.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoIt's a bizarre and blinkered article. The most immediate dangers are economic. We already have a hopelessly unstable economic system, with increasing swathes of the population economically disenfranchised. AI is more likely to accelerate that than prevent it. The other immediate dangers are social and political. When one person with resources can run an AI-enhanced troll farm and social media PR engine - not even remotely science fiction - we have a serious problem. Those threats are already politically and culturally existential. And that's before anyone has even fitted a gun to an AI-powered autonomous drone. Or gunship. AI is inherently conservative because it reinforces hierarchy. The AI-poor will have far less political, cultural, and personal leverage than the AI-rich. Essentially it will have the same effects as money as a cultural and political practice - but much more so.
- RandomLensman 3y agoAI could also be used for counter PR. Eventually, societies could shut down social media or ban use of AI content for political purposes, for example. I would also expect a huge uptick in bureaucracy from AI, so lots of new jobs will spring up.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoTo me, the hype around the economic consequences feels like cover for the collapse that is already in the cards. So I agree, when the house collapses, it won't be because AI took our jobs, but the politicians will have their scapegoat.
- rootusrootus 3y ago> We could end up in a world where 99.99% of people are redundant and useless cost centers for our GDP maximizing economic paradigm If 99% of consumers no longer have money to spend, GDP will definitely not be maximized.
- janalsncm 3y agoThey don’t need to be consumer goods. $1000 spent on clothes is the same as $1000 spent on GPUs as far as GDP is concerned. Headless businesses swapping dollars around creates plenty of GDP with few to no people involved.
- RC_ITR 3y agoA common fallacy is thinking that transactions exist without a human at either end of it (usually due to many layers of complexity in between). You can talk all you want about companies selling to companies, etc., but at the end of the day everything on earth is owned by a human eventually. Even high-frequency trades between two hedge funds are done with capital that was supplied by Limited Partners who probably are acting on behalf of pensioners. The scenario you're describing is one of extreme wealth inequality, which is a real problem, but one that's supposed to be solvable through democratic means. Stopping technological progress isn't going to solve it.
- janalsncm 3y agoSure, everything is owned by a human. But does it have to be 8 billion humans? Why not 8 million or even 8 thousand? If humans provide literally zero economic value and their costs are significant, what can our economic systems say about whether they should even exist? It’s Macroeconomic Changes Have Made it Impossible for Me to Want to Pay You [1] but on a global level. [1] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-have-made-it-impossible-for-me-to-want-to-pay-you https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
- RandomLensman 3y ago
- Aerroon 3y ago>I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. Because that's the goal of our economic system! If everything could be made with no human labor requirement, then the price of these goods is going to trend towards zero. The disruption is going to cause pain, but ultimately that's what we've always been after.
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoWell, no. The goal is to maximise profit. One way to do that is to minimise labour costs. But at the extreme, if there are then no consumers who can buy your goods there is no profit...
- winstonprivacy 3y agoI'm sure the people you were replying to don't appreciate your inconvenient insertion of critical thinking...
- Aerroon 3y ago>The goal is to maximise profit No, it isn't. Profit is meaningless, money is inherently worthless. Capitalism exists to encourage the production of (new) goods and services. The system is set up to encourage people to take their capital and invest it for this purpose. Investments help business ideas that would otherwise never have been made, because the person with the idea couldn't afford it. In return the investor gets a slice of the potential future profits. But the goal of the system is the products the company creates. Money is worthless. It only carries value based on what you can trade that money for. If I have $10, but a cup of coffee costs $1000, then my $10 are meaningless. But if a house cost $1 then my $10 is very valuable. And what you can trade your money for are the goods that are produced by the economic system.
- lukifer 3y agoThe more salient term isn't "capitalism", but rather "capitalization". Most investment is done by converting anticipated future value (modulo some degree of risk), and encapsulating it into an asset price, which is relative to the opportunity cost of alternative investments, and the current discount rate. And capitalization doesn't have a goal beyond honoring those future returns (or "embedded growth obligations"). It doesn't care whether those returns come from innovation, production, rent-seeking, or even a "greater sucker" Ponzi scheme. Investors (and their financial agents) operate almost entirely on Make Number Go Up ("buy low sell high"), and any incentives that result in win-win increases to human flourishing are entirely secondary effects.
- gumballindie 3y agoIt is, just not by the media. They only worry when their jobs are threatened. The rest of us can have cake.
- cmdli 3y agoGiven that the number of people in agriculture declined from 90% to 10% over the past 200 years or so, I'm less worried about disruption like this. People are remarkably retrainable, and just because current jobs no longer exist doesn't mean we won't create new ones out of thin air (like marketing, or Youtubers, or film lighting specialists).
- sgu999 3y agoHow much of that would be due to the fact that we increased productivity on essential goods which inevitably benefitted everyone to some extent? It may be very different when a large portion of the jobs being destroyed are mostly useless to the productivity to start with.
- sdwr 3y agoThe world median will be chinese or indian, but the american median will be white!
- XorNot 3y agoThis is just repeating the fallacy that the person being replaced is going to be the blue-collar worker. But it isn't...it's the office knowledge worker. Anyone cruising in the middle bucket where you don't do creative research, but you do sit in front of a computer. AI is coming for those groups. The blue collar worker? They'll be fine for decades. Anyone who gets out there and manipulates the physical environment, won't be replaced any time soon.
- anonyfox 3y agoAs soon as a significant share of the population is „irrelevant“ and treated as such (read: no good welfare, …), capitalism will end quickly. „Who owns the machines that generate value“ will shift from individuals/corporations towards a public good, and Marx ultimately was right.
- loup-vaillant 3y agoYeah, but capitalists have all the guns. Not directly, but the hired guns (police, military), work for the capitalists. In fact, if you watch The Rules for Rulers, there’s the possibility of turning the entire world into a 3rd world corrupted structure: a few people at the top enjoying the riches of full automation, a few more people with guns to protect them from the unwashed masses, and everyone else. If democracy really comes from the fact that we need everyone’s labour to make a country, we may actually lose it as automation makes most of us economically irrelevant. We need an alternative before the window closes. If we’re lucky it won’t ever close, but to be honest I won’t bet on it.
- anonyfox 3y agoThe tipping point is when some „unwashed masses“ decide to go to a billionaire mansion and explain them (forcefully) that they aren’t billionaires any longer, and neither the security staff nor the called police will step in, since they are part of the masses (family ties, defunding, …). Why should they do cruel work for a salary if they can take their part of the wealth directly?
- loup-vaillant 3y agoThat’s possible as long as the police aren’t robot, and the mansion isn’t orbiting in space. Now Elysium doesn’t have to happen (and good luck with the giant space station) but a sufficiently walled garden guarded by sufficiently automated defences supplied by a sufficiently automated workforce could in fact repel anyone else trying to get in with nothing more than small arms. Though I reckon an organised unwashed mass could most likely do something.
- yanderekko 3y ago>So you can continue your performative concerns about Roko’s Basillisk or whatever topic of distant, paralyzing uncertainty is overflowing from the next room into mine. Amusing, usually rationalists are made fun of because the concerns about Roko's Basilisk are not performative.
- spacebanana7 3y agoThere was a time when 90% of the labour force worked in agriculture. If I lived in the 1600s I'd be terribly concerned that mass unemployment would coincide with large increases in agricultural productivity. However, when the agricultural sector became more productive the 'winners' wanted bigger houses, travel, education, healthcare etc and this provided enough opportunity for the displaced workers to find jobs. These new sectors, over time, even offered more wealth and better working conditions to their workers than the old agricultural sector.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoThis is a common trope, but the reality is that the winners bought the farms from folks who couldn't compete. The ex-farmers did not go on to find better compensation, they just became poor. Their children perhaps found a larger salary in the information economy, but ask them how many acres they can pass on to their grandchildren.
- spacebanana7 3y agoIt’s important to distinguish between the farmers pushed out of agriculture and those pulled towards the industrial/service sector. Some of the farmers pushed out of agriculture were in a truly terrible position. Some effectively exiled into other countries (e.g highland clearances in Scotland) or left with no choice beyond military service in poor conditions. Other ex-farmers were pulled into the high wage new economy sectors. I imagine this was a comparatively happier experience, although not without its difficulties. For example, the shipbuilding or railway workers. In a more modern example, the Chinese factory worker.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoYeah, I've been trying to figure out how to feel about china "lifting a billion people out of poverty" for a long while, because if I squint it kinda looks like land owners getting displaced by a government that would rather work then to death in cities than allow them a meek existence in the countryside. For young people, having a wage and the agency to spend it how they choose is worth a lot, but I still wonder how much choice they really have. I suppose it's a matter of whether you see a future for yourself down on the farm vs where all the economic growth and excitement lies. But even given that the kids will be alright, my point was that the breadwinners displaced by progress do not find an alternate income - they rely on the next generation to adapt.
- LatteLazy 3y agoFYI, the employment rate in the west in between 50% and 75%.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago> The obsoletariat mostly won’t be Americans. The median member of this class will probably be Chinese or Indian. Anyone doing physical labor is going to be just as necessary in a world of artificial mind, it's those knowledge workers of the service economy that will find their skills automated.