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Maybe a weird question, but how does a capitalist economy work where AGI-performed-labor is categorically less expensive than human-performed labor? Do most peo

Maybe a weird question, but how does a capitalist economy work where AGI-performed-labor is categorically less expensive than human-performed labor? Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?

next_xibalba 2y ago
No one has a strong answer for this. This question was the origin of a lot of universal basic income chatter and research beginning in maybe 2014. The idea being, whoever creates superintelligence will capture substantively all future profits. If a non-profit (or capped profit) company does it, they could fund UBI for society. But the research into UBI have not been very decisive. Do people flourish or flounder when receiving UBI? And what does that, in aggregate, do to a society? We still don't really know. Oh and also, OAI is no longer a non-profit and has eliminated the profit cap.
slibhb 2y ago
The question shows a total disconnect from reality. People who are unemployed with no money today don't die. Even street people don't die. If AGI labor is cheaper and as effective as human labor, prices will drop to the point where the necessities cost very little. People will be able to support themselves working part-time jobs on whatever hasn't been automated. The tax system will become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative income tax. People will still whine and bitch about capitalism even as it negates the need for them to lift a single finger.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  Until now, I didn't think that poverty impacting mortality was a controversial statement. Poverty is the fourth greatest cause of US deaths[1]. Why would I hire a part time worker when I could hire an AI for cheaper? When I said categorically, I meant it. 1. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-poverty-fourth-greatest-deaths-analysis.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-poverty-fourth-greate...
  - slibhb 2y ago
    Quite a goal post move from "just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die" to "poverty impacts health"
    - kelseyfrog 2y ago
      I didn't say health; you did. I said mortality which is synonymous with death. Misquoting someone to prove a point is intellectually bankrupt. Take a breath and calm down. Why don't you try stealmanning instead?
      - slibhb 2y ago
        "Negatively impacts mortality" doesn't mean "kills" or "causes to die". "Bad for health" is a better interpretation. Do you really believe that unemployment + bankruptcy = death? If you don't believe that, then why are you writing sentences like this: > Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?
        kelseyfrog 2y ago
        Yes. The all-cause mortality hazard ratio for unemployment is 1.85[1]. Nearly doubling mortality is an incredible result. Reducing my argument to a guarantee of death in order to prove it wrong is absurd. 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4677456/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4677456/
- elif 2y ago
  >People who are unemployed with no money today don't die. Even street people don't die. Small point of contention here, but 100% of people die, and 'street people' exceptionally quickly. >The tax system will become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative income tax. And when the productive economy profits from automation while the government tax revenue decreases from lost income tax, what do you think this arbitrary money printing will do to the USD?
- ben_w 2y ago
  > People will be able to support themselves working part-time jobs on whatever hasn't been automated That assumes anything remains that hasn't been automated. The "G" in "AGI" means different things to different people, because generality isn't really a boolean that you have or don't have, but if the AGI has a G at least as general as human intelligence, then everything we can do will be automated.
Barrin92 2y ago
By artificially recreating scarcity in virtual space and reproducing the same kind economic dynamic there, what Antonio Negri called 'symbolic production'. Think fashion brands, video game currency, IP, crypto, Clubhouse, effectively the world we're already in. There's an older essay by Zizek somewhere where he points out that this already has played out. Marx was convinced 'general intellect', what we know call the 'knowledge economy' would render traditional economics obsolete, but we just privatized knowledge and reimposed the same logic on top of it.
- wmf 2y ago
  Most people have nothing to contribute in the virtual/knowledge realm. Certainly not enough to live on.
  - pixelsort 2y ago
    Careful, we are not supposed to discuss how many human jobs will remain. The script clearly states the approved lines are "there will still be human jobs" and "focus on being adaptable". When it seems normal that Fortune 500 execs are living at sea on yachts, that's when you'll know OpenAI realized their vision for humanity.
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      I would think certain recent events in New York will probably be a bigger impetus for Fortune 500 execs living at sea on yachts
      - pixelsort 2y ago
        We might have fewer future vigilante executive assassins if our government, and FTC in particular, would deem to enact consumer protections against things like AI-based medical claims recommendations that go beyond initial triage/routing to human handlers. We're going to continue watching the rapid AI-driven annihilation of the demand for human customer support specialists. They are just the first major rung of the ladder to fall. Without protections, even UBI, it's hard to imagine things getting safer for anyone.
natbennett 2y ago
Comparative advantage. Even if AGI is better at absolutely all work the amount of work it is capable of doing is finite. So AGI will end up mostly being used for the highest value, most differentiated work it’s capable of, and it will “trade” with humans for work where humans have a lower opportunity cost, even if it would technically be better at those tasks too. Basically the same dynamic that you see in e.g. customer support. A company’s founder is going to be better than your typical tier 1 support person at every tier 1 support task, but the founder’s time is limited and the opportunity cost of spending their time on first-contact support is high.
- hollownobody 2y ago
  I think you assume that there will only be one model. However, as we can see today, there can also be a variety of prices/qualities. Why wouldn't the tier 1 support people be also replaced, but by cheaper models?
judah 2y ago
I remember watching an episode of the 1960s police drama, Dragnet. In one of the episodes, Detective Joe Friday spoke with some computer technicians in a building full of computers (giant, at the time). Friday asked the computer technician, > "One more thing. Do you think that computers will take all our jobs one day?" > "No. There will always be jobs for humans. Those jobs will change, maybe include working on and maintaining computers, but there will still be important jobs for humans." That bit of TV stuck with me. Here we are 60 years later and that has proven true. I suspect it will still be true in 60 years, regardless of how well AI advances. Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI and current CEO of Anthropic, notes[0] a similar sentiment: > "First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI’s are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”. Amodei does think that eventually we may need to eventually organize economic structures with powerful AI in mind, but this need not imply humans will never have jobs. [0]: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  To summarize, fears of AI out competing humans for labor rely on the "lump of labor fallacy" which is the same fallacy employed to justify anti-immigrant sentiment in the form of "they took our jobs"?
jdminhbg 2y ago
The way comparative advantage works, even if an AGI is better than me at Task A and Task B, if it is better at Task A than Task B, it'll do Task A and I'll do Task B. I think a lot of people confuse AGI with infinite AGI.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  … what No, you’re confusing finite AGI for an AGI that can only compete with a single person at a time. In a world of AGI better-than-humans at both A and B, it’s a whole lot cheaper to replicate AGI that’s better at A and B and do both A and B than it is to employ human beings who do B badly.
  - jdminhbg 2y ago
    Again, you're just assuming you can infinitely replicate AGI, and there's no reason to think that's the case. It's only always cheaper to replicate AGI if there is no resource constraint on doing so.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      AGI that is competent enough to perform any task better than a human, can perform tasks of controlling robots and mining equipment and construction equipment and factories and compute foundaries, to create more robots and mining equipments and etc. etc. Look up into the sky tonight. That glowing white-ish disk is made of the resource constraints, and is a tiny fraction of the resources available. It may be a finite quantity of resources, but with regards to the economic impact it's enough that it may as well be infinite compared to what humans can do… and what we can experience as a consumer. I mean, sure, a McKendree cylinder is bigger than an O'Neill cylinder, but the scale of what's being suggested by AGI is literally everyone getting their own personal fleet of 60 or so O'Neill cylinders — enough to spend a lifetime exploring, to be a playground for anything any of us want. Demand gets saturated. And even that's not enough. From the other side of the equation, we humans have a basic energy cost to staying alive. There are already domains where AI can do things for energy costs so low that it isn't "economical" to pay for the calories needed to keep a human brain conscious long enough to notice that it has seen the result, much less to do that task. Should that become true across all domains, there's no comparative advantage to keeping us alive. Hide the farm where your food grew behind PV, disassemble the sand and clay in the soil into constituent atoms and use the silicon to make more compute or more power.
elif 2y ago
There are essentially two answers to this question, and neither are in the interests of capital so there will never be progress if power toward them until forced. The first is the bill gates "income tax for robots" idea which does a kind of hand wavey thing figuring out how to calculate a robot, how the government will distribute taxes, etc. That one is a mess impossible to get support for and nearly impossible to transition to. The other idea, put forth by the Democracy in Europe 2025 party, is called a universal basic dividend, which essentially says that to make AI owned by humanity, the utility of automation should be calculated, and as a result, a dividend will be paid out (just like any other stock holder) which is a percent of that company's profit derived from automation. It becomes part of the corporate structure, rather than a government structure, so this one I think kinda has merit on paper, but likewise zero motivation to implement until it's virtually too late
- error_logic 2y ago
  Wealth tax, with the value declared by the owner as a requirement for the government defending the property rights. Valuations deemed too low (attempted tax evasion) can be challenged by the government by calling an owner's bluff and forcing sale to the highest bidder at the price set by the second highest bidder.
- takinola 2y ago
  I don't quite follow the logic of either of these proposals. If (a big if) AGI displaces human labor, then most people will not have any income from employment. If that happens, who has the income to purchase the output of the AGI? If the addressable market served by the AGI declines drastically, then where do the profits come from? If the AGI has low/no profits, where does the tax or dividend come from? The only solution I can come up with to this conundrum is if the output of the AGI is provided for free to people so the value is captured directly without the intermediating commercial steps. However, there will still be friction in this process (in the form of physical inputs) so I don't see how this is a long term sustainable approach. Good thing I don't believe in AGI so this is, at best, a philosophical debate.
neumann 2y ago
I am pretty convinced that's the outcome. Too much credit to say that is their plan, I think they frankly don't care as long as they get to win, control and increase their power within their circles. None of these people live with empathy, they are all on their own narrative which if it does account for other people is them trying to speed run the story path where everyone hero worships them.
brudgers 2y ago
If things are bad enough, some people will think Mars sounds better. It won’t be, but people will want to believe it will and marketing will suggest it.
sensanaty 2y ago
The whole plan for most of the AI sycophants is to earn a trillion dollars off of selling AI, and whatever happens to the plebs is an afterthought (really, not a thought at all). I suspect and hope there's gonna be a lot more Luigi Mangione's coming about soon, though.
Sateeshm 2y ago
And also if everyone is out of job and no money, who is buying the products made by robots?
- ben_w 2y ago
  The actual money doesn't evaporate, someone somewhere always has some in an account and/or in notes and coins. If all the money ends up in one place, from one single person to an entire group, if they have no need to spend any of it ever because the robots they control will make everything for them, then the rest invent a replacement currency and contine their own disconnected economy without the results of the automation. But the very fact that some person or group is capable of hoarding all the money because they no longer need to spend it, means they have no real reason to care if it's taken away or diluted by government orders for "inflationary" (in this case more like "anti-deflationary") money printing. How well that new economy works for those without automation is difficult to guess and depends on what real resources (if any, currency in the abstract doesn't count but precious metals might) get monopolised by those with automation, though the transition to it would likely be disruptive. But that disconnect only happens when the robots can, amongst other things, make more robots (if robots can't do that then humans get paid to make robots), at which point money as we use it today stops being relevant — if I had such automation, it stops mattering to me if my tenants pay rent or not, irregardless of if they have that automation themselves, and I can tell a robot to make another robot and then give it to my tenant without meaningful loss to myself.

next_xibalba 2y ago

No one has a strong answer for this. This question was the origin of a lot of universal basic income chatter and research beginning in maybe 2014. The idea being, whoever creates superintelligence will capture substantively all future profits. If a non-profit (or capped profit) company does it, they could fund UBI for society. But the research into UBI have not been very decisive. Do people flourish or flounder when receiving UBI? And what does that, in aggregate, do to a society? We still don't really know. Oh and also, OAI is no longer a non-profit and has eliminated the profit cap.

slibhb 2y ago

The question shows a total disconnect from reality. People who are unemployed with no money today don't die. Even street people don't die. If AGI labor is cheaper and as effective as human labor, prices will drop to the point where the necessities cost very little. People will be able to support themselves working part-time jobs on whatever hasn't been automated. The tax system will become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative income tax. People will still whine and bitch about capitalism even as it negates the need for them to lift a single finger.

kelseyfrog 2y ago
Until now, I didn't think that poverty impacting mortality was a controversial statement. Poverty is the fourth greatest cause of US deaths[1]. Why would I hire a part time worker when I could hire an AI for cheaper? When I said categorically, I meant it. 1. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-poverty-fourth-greatest-deaths-analysis.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-poverty-fourth-greate...
- slibhb 2y ago
  Quite a goal post move from "just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die" to "poverty impacts health"
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    I didn't say health; you did. I said mortality which is synonymous with death. Misquoting someone to prove a point is intellectually bankrupt. Take a breath and calm down. Why don't you try stealmanning instead?
    - slibhb 2y ago
      "Negatively impacts mortality" doesn't mean "kills" or "causes to die". "Bad for health" is a better interpretation. Do you really believe that unemployment + bankruptcy = death? If you don't believe that, then why are you writing sentences like this: > Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?
      - kelseyfrog 2y ago
        Yes. The all-cause mortality hazard ratio for unemployment is 1.85[1]. Nearly doubling mortality is an incredible result. Reducing my argument to a guarantee of death in order to prove it wrong is absurd. 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4677456/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4677456/
elif 2y ago
>People who are unemployed with no money today don't die. Even street people don't die. Small point of contention here, but 100% of people die, and 'street people' exceptionally quickly. >The tax system will become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative income tax. And when the productive economy profits from automation while the government tax revenue decreases from lost income tax, what do you think this arbitrary money printing will do to the USD?
ben_w 2y ago
> People will be able to support themselves working part-time jobs on whatever hasn't been automated That assumes anything remains that hasn't been automated. The "G" in "AGI" means different things to different people, because generality isn't really a boolean that you have or don't have, but if the AGI has a G at least as general as human intelligence, then everything we can do will be automated.

Barrin92 2y ago

By artificially recreating scarcity in virtual space and reproducing the same kind economic dynamic there, what Antonio Negri called 'symbolic production'. Think fashion brands, video game currency, IP, crypto, Clubhouse, effectively the world we're already in. There's an older essay by Zizek somewhere where he points out that this already has played out. Marx was convinced 'general intellect', what we know call the 'knowledge economy' would render traditional economics obsolete, but we just privatized knowledge and reimposed the same logic on top of it.

wmf 2y ago
Most people have nothing to contribute in the virtual/knowledge realm. Certainly not enough to live on.
- pixelsort 2y ago
  Careful, we are not supposed to discuss how many human jobs will remain. The script clearly states the approved lines are "there will still be human jobs" and "focus on being adaptable". When it seems normal that Fortune 500 execs are living at sea on yachts, that's when you'll know OpenAI realized their vision for humanity.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    I would think certain recent events in New York will probably be a bigger impetus for Fortune 500 execs living at sea on yachts
    - pixelsort 2y ago
      We might have fewer future vigilante executive assassins if our government, and FTC in particular, would deem to enact consumer protections against things like AI-based medical claims recommendations that go beyond initial triage/routing to human handlers. We're going to continue watching the rapid AI-driven annihilation of the demand for human customer support specialists. They are just the first major rung of the ladder to fall. Without protections, even UBI, it's hard to imagine things getting safer for anyone.

natbennett 2y ago

Comparative advantage. Even if AGI is better at absolutely all work the amount of work it is capable of doing is finite. So AGI will end up mostly being used for the highest value, most differentiated work it’s capable of, and it will “trade” with humans for work where humans have a lower opportunity cost, even if it would technically be better at those tasks too. Basically the same dynamic that you see in e.g. customer support. A company’s founder is going to be better than your typical tier 1 support person at every tier 1 support task, but the founder’s time is limited and the opportunity cost of spending their time on first-contact support is high.

hollownobody 2y ago
I think you assume that there will only be one model. However, as we can see today, there can also be a variety of prices/qualities. Why wouldn't the tier 1 support people be also replaced, but by cheaper models?

judah 2y ago

I remember watching an episode of the 1960s police drama, Dragnet. In one of the episodes, Detective Joe Friday spoke with some computer technicians in a building full of computers (giant, at the time). Friday asked the computer technician, > "One more thing. Do you think that computers will take all our jobs one day?" > "No. There will always be jobs for humans. Those jobs will change, maybe include working on and maintaining computers, but there will still be important jobs for humans." That bit of TV stuck with me. Here we are 60 years later and that has proven true. I suspect it will still be true in 60 years, regardless of how well AI advances. Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI and current CEO of Anthropic, notes[0] a similar sentiment: > "First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI’s are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”. Amodei does think that eventually we may need to eventually organize economic structures with powerful AI in mind, but this need not imply humans will never have jobs. [0]: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace

kelseyfrog 2y ago
To summarize, fears of AI out competing humans for labor rely on the "lump of labor fallacy" which is the same fallacy employed to justify anti-immigrant sentiment in the form of "they took our jobs"?

jdminhbg 2y ago

The way comparative advantage works, even if an AGI is better than me at Task A and Task B, if it is better at Task A than Task B, it'll do Task A and I'll do Task B. I think a lot of people confuse AGI with infinite AGI.

llamaimperative 2y ago
… what No, you’re confusing finite AGI for an AGI that can only compete with a single person at a time. In a world of AGI better-than-humans at both A and B, it’s a whole lot cheaper to replicate AGI that’s better at A and B and do both A and B than it is to employ human beings who do B badly.
- jdminhbg 2y ago
  Again, you're just assuming you can infinitely replicate AGI, and there's no reason to think that's the case. It's only always cheaper to replicate AGI if there is no resource constraint on doing so.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    AGI that is competent enough to perform any task better than a human, can perform tasks of controlling robots and mining equipment and construction equipment and factories and compute foundaries, to create more robots and mining equipments and etc. etc. Look up into the sky tonight. That glowing white-ish disk is made of the resource constraints, and is a tiny fraction of the resources available. It may be a finite quantity of resources, but with regards to the economic impact it's enough that it may as well be infinite compared to what humans can do… and what we can experience as a consumer. I mean, sure, a McKendree cylinder is bigger than an O'Neill cylinder, but the scale of what's being suggested by AGI is literally everyone getting their own personal fleet of 60 or so O'Neill cylinders — enough to spend a lifetime exploring, to be a playground for anything any of us want. Demand gets saturated. And even that's not enough. From the other side of the equation, we humans have a basic energy cost to staying alive. There are already domains where AI can do things for energy costs so low that it isn't "economical" to pay for the calories needed to keep a human brain conscious long enough to notice that it has seen the result, much less to do that task. Should that become true across all domains, there's no comparative advantage to keeping us alive. Hide the farm where your food grew behind PV, disassemble the sand and clay in the soil into constituent atoms and use the silicon to make more compute or more power.

elif 2y ago

There are essentially two answers to this question, and neither are in the interests of capital so there will never be progress if power toward them until forced. The first is the bill gates "income tax for robots" idea which does a kind of hand wavey thing figuring out how to calculate a robot, how the government will distribute taxes, etc. That one is a mess impossible to get support for and nearly impossible to transition to. The other idea, put forth by the Democracy in Europe 2025 party, is called a universal basic dividend, which essentially says that to make AI owned by humanity, the utility of automation should be calculated, and as a result, a dividend will be paid out (just like any other stock holder) which is a percent of that company's profit derived from automation. It becomes part of the corporate structure, rather than a government structure, so this one I think kinda has merit on paper, but likewise zero motivation to implement until it's virtually too late

error_logic 2y ago
Wealth tax, with the value declared by the owner as a requirement for the government defending the property rights. Valuations deemed too low (attempted tax evasion) can be challenged by the government by calling an owner's bluff and forcing sale to the highest bidder at the price set by the second highest bidder.
takinola 2y ago
I don't quite follow the logic of either of these proposals. If (a big if) AGI displaces human labor, then most people will not have any income from employment. If that happens, who has the income to purchase the output of the AGI? If the addressable market served by the AGI declines drastically, then where do the profits come from? If the AGI has low/no profits, where does the tax or dividend come from? The only solution I can come up with to this conundrum is if the output of the AGI is provided for free to people so the value is captured directly without the intermediating commercial steps. However, there will still be friction in this process (in the form of physical inputs) so I don't see how this is a long term sustainable approach. Good thing I don't believe in AGI so this is, at best, a philosophical debate.

neumann 2y ago

I am pretty convinced that's the outcome. Too much credit to say that is their plan, I think they frankly don't care as long as they get to win, control and increase their power within their circles. None of these people live with empathy, they are all on their own narrative which if it does account for other people is them trying to speed run the story path where everyone hero worships them.

brudgers 2y ago

If things are bad enough, some people will think Mars sounds better. It won’t be, but people will want to believe it will and marketing will suggest it.

sensanaty 2y ago

The whole plan for most of the AI sycophants is to earn a trillion dollars off of selling AI, and whatever happens to the plebs is an afterthought (really, not a thought at all). I suspect and hope there's gonna be a lot more Luigi Mangione's coming about soon, though.

Sateeshm 2y ago

And also if everyone is out of job and no money, who is buying the products made by robots?

ben_w 2y ago
The actual money doesn't evaporate, someone somewhere always has some in an account and/or in notes and coins. If all the money ends up in one place, from one single person to an entire group, if they have no need to spend any of it ever because the robots they control will make everything for them, then the rest invent a replacement currency and contine their own disconnected economy without the results of the automation. But the very fact that some person or group is capable of hoarding all the money because they no longer need to spend it, means they have no real reason to care if it's taken away or diluted by government orders for "inflationary" (in this case more like "anti-deflationary") money printing. How well that new economy works for those without automation is difficult to guess and depends on what real resources (if any, currency in the abstract doesn't count but precious metals might) get monopolised by those with automation, though the transition to it would likely be disruptive. But that disconnect only happens when the robots can, amongst other things, make more robots (if robots can't do that then humans get paid to make robots), at which point money as we use it today stops being relevant — if I had such automation, it stops mattering to me if my tenants pay rent or not, irregardless of if they have that automation themselves, and I can tell a robot to make another robot and then give it to my tenant without meaningful loss to myself.