8 ms·

Strategic Wealth Accumulation Under Transformative AI Expectations

98 points by jandrewrogers 2y ago

wcoenen 2y ago
If I understand correctly, this paper is arguing that investors will desperately allocate all their capital such that they maximize ownership of future AI systems. The market value of anything else crashes because it comes with the opportunity cost of owning less future AI. Interest rates explode, pre-existing bonds become worthless, and AI stocks go to the moon. It's an interesting idea. But if the economy grinds to a halt because of that kind of investor behavior, it seems unlikely governments will just do nothing. E.g. what if they heavily tax ownership of AI-related assets?
- itsafarqueue 2y ago
  Correct. As a thought experiment, this becomes the most likely (non violent) way to stave off the mass impoverishment that is coming for the rest of us in an economic model that sees AI subsume productive work above some level.
  - throwawayqqq11 2y ago
    Well, i really dont want to be the dystopian guy any more but doesnt this political correction require political representation of such an idea? Looking at the past, cybernetic socialism appears very unlikely to me.
- DennisP 2y ago
  It seems more general than that. Right now returns go partly to capital, partly to labor. With "transformative AI" the returns go almost entirely to capital. This is true whether it's mostly from labor shrinking or total output increasing. Since most returns go to capital, we can expect returns on capital to increase.
  - harshalizee 2y ago
    How does that even work? If labor has no income to spend on goods and services. where is the return on capital coming from? Isn't this halting velocity of money, thereby making it useless? Can someone smarter explain this to me.
    - hollerith 2y ago
      >If labor has no income to spend on goods and services, where is the return on capital coming from? Some goods and services are sold to another business, not a consumer. Right now, these "B2B" sales represent about 30% of sales volume in the economy, but there is probably no impediment to that number rising to 90%.
      - asdff 2y ago
        How many of those B2B exist entirely isolated from the consumer market though? I would guess few to even zero to some degree of association with an end consumer. Even government contractors building bombs to sell to the government and such depend on the American consumer generating their own income and paying taxes ultimately.
        hollerith 2y ago
        >Even government contractors building bombs to sell to the government and such depend on the American consumer generating their own income and paying taxes ultimately. That's just the thing though: if we transition to a reality in which 90% or 99% of economic activity does not involve consumers, governments will adapt by taxing consumers (i.e., employees) less and investors and corporations more. It's also possible that corporations will escape the governmental oversight and control that they are currently under, which means governments of the world would shrink because they have to survive on taxes on the 1% of the economy that remains under the control of employees and consumers. I certainly want most of the economy to serve people, but there is nothing contradictory or impossible about the possibility that 99% of it is a competition between ultra-wealthy corporations.
- asdff 2y ago
  It seems unlikely because it isn't even rooted in precedent. If this were the case why didn't the world divest from everything and invest into petroleum related investments exclusively after 1900? The reality is that diversification has advantages for an investor. One might say with this same logic why does anyone buy any stock that doesn't perform as well as nvda today? Because past performance doesn't guarantee future returns and there is sense in diversification.
visarga 2y ago
This paper's got it backwards. AI's benefits don't pile up with the owners, they flow to whoever's got a problem to solve and knows how to point the AI at it. Think of AI like a library: owning the books doesn't make you benefit much, applying knowledge to problems does. The big winners are the ones setting the prompts, not the ones owning the servers. AI developers? They're making cents per million tokens while users, solo or corporate, cash in on the real value: application. Sure, the rich might hire some more people to aim the AI for them, but who's got a monopoly on problems? Nobody. Every freelancer, farmer, or startup's got their own problems to fix, and cheap AI access means they can. The paper's obsessed with wealth grabbing all the future benefits, but problems are everywhere, good luck cornering that market. Every one of us has their own problems and stands to get personalized benefits from AI. In the age of AI having problems is linked to receiving its benefits. Imagine for example I feel one side of my face drooping and have speech difficulty, and I type my symptoms into a LLM, and it tells me to quickly visit the doctors. It might save my life from stroke. Who gets the largest benefit here? Problems are distributed even if AI is not.
- tyre 2y ago
  > The big winners are the ones setting the prompts, not the ones owning the servers. AI developers? They're making cents per million tokens while users, solo or corporate, cash in on the real value: application If this were true, AWS wouldn't have pulled in well over $100bn in 2024. Nvidia wouldn't be worth $3.3tn. The owners and builders of infra make a ton of money.
  - visarga 2y ago
    AWS makes a fraction of the money their customers make. And NVIDIA is just seeing benefits from market speculation at work. Most LLM providers are losing money right now.
whatever1 2y ago
Ok let’s play this scenario. Why this was not the case when the internet was at its infancy? People kept pumping money at young and failing tech companies, they were not hoarding at the expectation that internet will mature and the marginal cost Production for the internet companies will become 0.
yieldcrv 2y ago
Do you have a degree in theoretical economics? “I have a theoretical degree in economics” You’re hired! real talk though, I wish I had just encountered an obscure paper that could lead me to refining a model for myself, but it seems like there would be so many competing papers that its the same as having none
WorkerBee28474 2y ago
Not worth reading. > this paper focuses specifically on the zero-sum nature of AI labor automation... When AI automates a job - whether a truck driver, lawyer, or researcher - the wages previously earned by the human worker... flow to whoever controls the AI system performing that job. The paper examines a world people will pay an AI lawyer $500 to write a document instead of paying a human lawyer $500 to write a document. That will never happen.
- geysersam 2y ago
  > zero sum nature of labor automation Labor automation is not zero sum. This statement alone makes me sceptical of the conclusions in the article. With sufficiently advanced AI we might not have to do any work. That would be fantastic and extraordinarily valuable. How we allocate the value produced by the automation is a separate question. Our current system would probably not be able to allocate the value produced by such automation efficiently.
- hartator 2y ago
  Yeah, and this applies to every technology ever. You can even use the same argument line against the wheel, electricity, or farming.
- tim333 2y ago
  I agree that quote seems wrong. When tech reduces the cost of providing a service, the price of the service to consumers is generally driven down correspondingly by competition rather than the service provider getting rich. The whole AI will cause interest rates to shoot up thing seems a bit mad.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > The paper examines a world people will pay an AI lawyer $500 to write a document instead of paying a human lawyer $500 to write a document. That will never happen. It's an absurd assumption made by AI investors everywhere. They can't handle a world where everyone already has an AI lawyer at home that they trust, that they have because they once paid $100 for it at a kiosk in the mall or pirated it. The real future is an AI lawyer on your keychain and an extreme devaluation of the skill of knowing the law and making legal arguments. Instead, we're going to have a weirder world where you show up to court and the court already has a list of your best legal arguments that they generated completely independent of you, and they largely match the list of arguments that your own AI advisor app gave you. They'll send you messages regarding your best next steps, and if your own device agrees, all you'll have to do is reply 'Y.' For simple document preparation, I'm pretty sure that your phone will be able to handle it, and AI at the point of submission would be able to give you helpful suggestions if the documents were inadequate. LLMs can almost do things of this degree of difficulty reasonably well now. Where will they be (or their successors be) in 10 years? Why do we think they will be as expensive as lawyers, who you have to send to difficult schools for a long time, feed, and flatter?
farts_mckensy 2y ago
this paper asserts that when "TAI" arrives, human labor is simply replaced by AI labor while keeping aggregate labor constant. it treats human labor as a mere input that can be swapped out without consequence, which ignores the fact that human labor is the source of wages and, therefore, consumer demand. remove human labor from the equation, and the whole thing collapses.
- jsemrau 2y ago
  Accelerationists believe in a post-scarcity society where the cost of production will be negligible. In that scenario, and I am not a believer, consumer demand would be independent of wages.
  - farts_mckensy 2y ago
    In that scenario, wages and money in general would be obsolete.
  - riffraff 2y ago
    That makes wealth accumulation pointless so the whole article makes no sense either, right? Tho I guess even post scarcity we'd have people who care about hoarding gold-pressed latinum.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    > consumer demand would be independent of wages That's the literal actual textbook definition of "communism". Lmao that I actually lived to see the day when techbros seriously discuss this.
    - farts_mckensy 2y ago
      That is not the "textbook definition" of communism. You have no idea what you're talking about.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      > Lmao that I actually lived to see the day when techbros seriously discuss this. People have been making comparisons between post scarcity economics and "utopia communism" for decades at this point. This talking point probably predates your birth.
zurfer 2y ago
Given that the paper disappoints, I'd love to hear what fellow HN readers do to prepare? My prep is: 1) building a company (https://getdot.ai https://getdot.ai) that I think will add significant marginal benefits over using products from AI labs / TAI, ASI. 2) investing in the chip manufacturing supply chain: from ASML, NVDA, TSMC, ... and SnP 500. 3) Staying fit and healthy, so physical labour stays possible.
- bob1029 2y ago
  I'd say #3 is most important. I'd also add: 4) Develop an obsession for the customers & their experiences around your products. I find it quite rare to see developers interacting directly with the customer. Stepping outside the comfort zone of backend code can grow you in ways the AI will not soon overtake. #3 can make working with the customer a lot easier too. Whether or not we like it, there are certain realities that exist around sales/marketing and how we physically present ourselves.
- petesergeant 2y ago
  4) trying to position myself as an expert in building these systems
  - smeeger 2y ago
    [flagged]
- ghfhghg 2y ago
  2 has worked pretty well for me so far. I try to do 3 as much as possible. My current work explicitly forbids me from doing 1. Currently just figuring out the timing to leave.
- sfn42 2y ago
  Nothing. I don't think there's anything I need to prepare for. AI can't do my job and I doubt it will any time soon. Developers who think AI will replace them must be miserable at their job lol. At best AI will be a tool I use while developing software. For now I don't even think it's very good at that.
habinero 2y ago
This paper is silly. It asks the equivalent of "what if magic were true" (human-level AI) and answers with "the magic economy would be different." No kidding. FWIW, the author is listed as a fellow of "The Forethought Foundation" [0], which is part of the Effective Altruism crowd[1], who have some cultish doomerism views around AI [2][3] There's a reason this stuff goes up on a non-peer reviewed paper mill. -- [0] https://www.forethought.org/the-2022-cohort https://www.forethought.org/the-2022-cohort [1] https://www.forethought.org/about-us https://www.forethought.org/about-us [2] https://reason.com/2024/07/05/the-authoritarian-side-of-effective-altruism-comes-for-ai/ https://reason.com/2024/07/05/the-authoritarian-side-of-effe... [3] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/29/effective-altruisms-bait-and-switch-from-global-poverty-to-ai-doomerism/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/29/effective-altruisms-bait...
- krona 2y ago
  The entire philosophy of existential risk is based on a collection of absurd hypotheticals. Follow the money.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  >It asks the equivalent of "what if magic were true" (human-level AI) and answers with "the magic economy would be different." No kidding. Isn't developing AGI basically the mission of OpenAI et al? What's so bad about considering what will happen if they achieve their mission? >who have some cultish doomerism views around AI [2][3] Check the signatories on this statement: https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk
  - habinero 2y ago
    The same reason why there's not hundreds of papers about the benefits of Dyson spheres: without any ability to execute, it's just speculative science fiction. And yes, that link is exactly the behavior I'm talking about. It makes it sound like it's a top issue for all these people. Most of them work at EA-related places, but I spot-checked (really, I did) five people who worked in CS research but not at an EA company. I couldn't find any other public statements that they thought AI was that important. Do they know their names are on this page? Appeal to authority is a classic cult/fraud/misinformation/conspiracist tactic. If it says "so-and-so believes this" and not "so-and-so believes this and here's why", it's suspect.
abtinf 2y ago
Whoever endorsed this author to post on arxiv should have their endorsement privileges revoked.
baobabKoodaa 2y ago
I suspect this is being manipulated to be #1 on HN. Looking at the paper, and looking at the comments, there's no way it's #1 by organic votes.
- showmexyz 2y ago
  [flagged]
- mmooss 2y ago
  > looking at the comments Almost everything on HN gets those comments. Look at the top comments of almost any discussion - they will be a rejection / dismissal of the OP.
  - baobabKoodaa 2y ago
    No they're not. As a quick experiment I took the current top 3 stories on HN and looked at the top comment on each: - one is expanding on the topic without expressing disagreement - one is a eulogy - one expresses both agreement on some points and disagreement on other points
ggm 2y ago
Lawyers are like chartered engineers. It's not that you cannot do it for yourself, it's that using them confers certain instances of "insurance" against risk in the outcome. Where does an AI get chartered status, admitted to the bar, and insurance cover?
- mmooss 2y ago
  I don't think anyone who is an experienced lawyer can do it themselves, except very simple tasks.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    Oops - I met 'not an experienced lawyer'. I've gotta proofread.
  - ggm 2y ago
    "Do it for yourself" means self-rep in court, and not pay a lawyer. Not, legals doing AI for themselves. They already do use AI for various non stupid things but the ones who don't check it, pay the price when hallucinations are outed by the other side.
    - tyre 2y ago
      Lawyers are the last people who would represent themselves. They know how dumb that is.
- smeeger 2y ago
  it could be tomorrow. you dont know and the heuristics, which five years ago pointed unanimously to the utter impossibility of this idea, are now in favor of it.
daft_pink 2y ago
Is a small group really going to control AI systems or will competition bring the price down so much that everyone benefits and the unit cost of labor is further and further reduced.
- kfarr 2y ago
  At home inference is possible now and getting better every day
  - sureIy 2y ago
    At home inference by professionals. I don't expect dad to Do Your Own AI anytime soon, he'll still pay someone to set it up and run it.
- pineaux 2y ago
  I see a few possible scenarios. 1) all work gets done by AI. Owners of AI reap the benefits for a while. There is a race to the bottom concerning costs, but also because people are not earning wages and come ang really afford the outputs of production. Thus rendering profits close to zero. If the people controlling the systems do not give the people "on the bottom" some kind allowance they will not have any chance for income. They might ask horrible and sadistic things from the bottom people but they will need to do something. 2) if people get pushed into these situations they will get riot or start civil wars. "Butlerian jihads" will be quite normal. 3) another scenario is that the society controlled by the rich will start to criminalise non-work in the early stages, that will lead to a new slave class. I find this scenario highly likely. 4) one of the options that I find very likely if "useless" people do NOT get "culled" en mass is an initial period of Revolt followed an AI controlled communist "Utopia". Where people do not need to work but "own" the means of production (AI workers). Nobody needs to work. Work is LARPing and is done by people who act like workers but don't really do anything (like some people do today) A lot of people don't do this, there are still people who see non-workers as leeching of the workers, because workers are "rewarded" by ingame mechanics (having a "better job"). Parallel societies will become normal. Just like now. Rich people will give themselves "better jobs" some people dont play the game and there are no real consequences, but not being allowed to play. 5) an amalgamation of the scenario as above, but in this scenario everybody will be forced to larp with the asset owning class. They will give people "jobs" but these jobs are bullshit. Just like many jobs right now. Jobs are just a way of creating different social classes. There is no meritocracy. Just rituals. Some people get to do certain rituals that give them more social status and wealth. This is based on oligarch whims. Once in a while a revolt, but mostly not needed. Many other scenarios exist of course.
qingcharles 2y ago
What jobs do we think will survive if AGI is achieved? I was thinking religious leaders might get a good run. Outside of say, Futurama, I'm not sure many people will want faith-leadership from a robot?
- bad_haircut72 2y ago
  I think futurama got AGI exactly right, we will end up living along side robotic AIs that are just as coocoo as us
- etiam 2y ago
  To the extent that's just a matter of seeming the most compelling, I think they could blow humans out of the water. Add rich reinforcement feedback on what's the most addictive communication and what's superficially experienced as the most profound, and present-day large models could probably be a contender. A good robot body today is probably not far from being competitive as representation, and some holograms might well already be better in some ways. To the extent it requires actual faith it's presently a complete joke, of course, and I expect it will remain so for a long time. But I'd say the quality bar for congregation members is due for a rise.
- BarryMilo 2y ago
  Why would we need jobs at that point?
  - IsTom 2y ago
    Because the kind of people who'll own all the profits aren't going to share.
  - jajko 2y ago
    I dont think AI will lead into any form of working communism, so one still has to pay for products and services. It has been tried ad nausea and it always fails to calculate in human differences and flaws like greed and envy, so one layer of society ends up brutally dominating the rest.
  - 2y ago
bawolff 2y ago
If the singularity happens, i feel like interest rates will be the least of our concerns.
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  It's actually very important. If this kind of thing happens, if interest rates are 0.5%, then people on UBI could potentially have access to land and not have horrible lives, if it's 16% as these guys propose, they will be living in 1980s Tokyo cyberpunk boxes.
aquarin 2y ago
There is one thing that AI can't do. Because you can't punish the AI instance, AI cannot take responsibility.
- smeeger 2y ago
  this boils down to the definition of pain. what is pain? i doubt you know even if you have experienced it. theres no reason to think that even llms are not guided by something that resembles pain.

98 points by jandrewrogers 2y ago

If I understand correctly, this paper is arguing that investors will desperately allocate all their capital such that they maximize ownership of future AI systems. The market value of anything else crashes because it comes with the opportunity cost of owning less future AI. Interest rates explode, pre-existing bonds become worthless, and AI stocks go to the moon. It's an interesting idea. But if the economy grinds to a halt because of that kind of investor behavior, it seems unlikely governments will just do nothing. E.g. what if they heavily tax ownership of AI-related assets?

itsafarqueue 2y ago
Correct. As a thought experiment, this becomes the most likely (non violent) way to stave off the mass impoverishment that is coming for the rest of us in an economic model that sees AI subsume productive work above some level.
- throwawayqqq11 2y ago
  Well, i really dont want to be the dystopian guy any more but doesnt this political correction require political representation of such an idea? Looking at the past, cybernetic socialism appears very unlikely to me.
DennisP 2y ago
It seems more general than that. Right now returns go partly to capital, partly to labor. With "transformative AI" the returns go almost entirely to capital. This is true whether it's mostly from labor shrinking or total output increasing. Since most returns go to capital, we can expect returns on capital to increase.
- harshalizee 2y ago
  How does that even work? If labor has no income to spend on goods and services. where is the return on capital coming from? Isn't this halting velocity of money, thereby making it useless? Can someone smarter explain this to me.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    >If labor has no income to spend on goods and services, where is the return on capital coming from? Some goods and services are sold to another business, not a consumer. Right now, these "B2B" sales represent about 30% of sales volume in the economy, but there is probably no impediment to that number rising to 90%.
    - asdff 2y ago
      How many of those B2B exist entirely isolated from the consumer market though? I would guess few to even zero to some degree of association with an end consumer. Even government contractors building bombs to sell to the government and such depend on the American consumer generating their own income and paying taxes ultimately.
      - hollerith 2y ago
        >Even government contractors building bombs to sell to the government and such depend on the American consumer generating their own income and paying taxes ultimately. That's just the thing though: if we transition to a reality in which 90% or 99% of economic activity does not involve consumers, governments will adapt by taxing consumers (i.e., employees) less and investors and corporations more. It's also possible that corporations will escape the governmental oversight and control that they are currently under, which means governments of the world would shrink because they have to survive on taxes on the 1% of the economy that remains under the control of employees and consumers. I certainly want most of the economy to serve people, but there is nothing contradictory or impossible about the possibility that 99% of it is a competition between ultra-wealthy corporations.
asdff 2y ago
It seems unlikely because it isn't even rooted in precedent. If this were the case why didn't the world divest from everything and invest into petroleum related investments exclusively after 1900? The reality is that diversification has advantages for an investor. One might say with this same logic why does anyone buy any stock that doesn't perform as well as nvda today? Because past performance doesn't guarantee future returns and there is sense in diversification.

visarga 2y ago

This paper's got it backwards. AI's benefits don't pile up with the owners, they flow to whoever's got a problem to solve and knows how to point the AI at it. Think of AI like a library: owning the books doesn't make you benefit much, applying knowledge to problems does. The big winners are the ones setting the prompts, not the ones owning the servers. AI developers? They're making cents per million tokens while users, solo or corporate, cash in on the real value: application. Sure, the rich might hire some more people to aim the AI for them, but who's got a monopoly on problems? Nobody. Every freelancer, farmer, or startup's got their own problems to fix, and cheap AI access means they can. The paper's obsessed with wealth grabbing all the future benefits, but problems are everywhere, good luck cornering that market. Every one of us has their own problems and stands to get personalized benefits from AI. In the age of AI having problems is linked to receiving its benefits. Imagine for example I feel one side of my face drooping and have speech difficulty, and I type my symptoms into a LLM, and it tells me to quickly visit the doctors. It might save my life from stroke. Who gets the largest benefit here? Problems are distributed even if AI is not.

tyre 2y ago
> The big winners are the ones setting the prompts, not the ones owning the servers. AI developers? They're making cents per million tokens while users, solo or corporate, cash in on the real value: application If this were true, AWS wouldn't have pulled in well over $100bn in 2024. Nvidia wouldn't be worth $3.3tn. The owners and builders of infra make a ton of money.
- visarga 2y ago
  AWS makes a fraction of the money their customers make. And NVIDIA is just seeing benefits from market speculation at work. Most LLM providers are losing money right now.

whatever1 2y ago

Ok let’s play this scenario. Why this was not the case when the internet was at its infancy? People kept pumping money at young and failing tech companies, they were not hoarding at the expectation that internet will mature and the marginal cost Production for the internet companies will become 0.

yieldcrv 2y ago

Do you have a degree in theoretical economics? “I have a theoretical degree in economics” You’re hired! real talk though, I wish I had just encountered an obscure paper that could lead me to refining a model for myself, but it seems like there would be so many competing papers that its the same as having none

WorkerBee28474 2y ago

Not worth reading. > this paper focuses specifically on the zero-sum nature of AI labor automation... When AI automates a job - whether a truck driver, lawyer, or researcher - the wages previously earned by the human worker... flow to whoever controls the AI system performing that job. The paper examines a world people will pay an AI lawyer $500 to write a document instead of paying a human lawyer $500 to write a document. That will never happen.

geysersam 2y ago
> zero sum nature of labor automation Labor automation is not zero sum. This statement alone makes me sceptical of the conclusions in the article. With sufficiently advanced AI we might not have to do any work. That would be fantastic and extraordinarily valuable. How we allocate the value produced by the automation is a separate question. Our current system would probably not be able to allocate the value produced by such automation efficiently.
hartator 2y ago
Yeah, and this applies to every technology ever. You can even use the same argument line against the wheel, electricity, or farming.
tim333 2y ago
I agree that quote seems wrong. When tech reduces the cost of providing a service, the price of the service to consumers is generally driven down correspondingly by competition rather than the service provider getting rich. The whole AI will cause interest rates to shoot up thing seems a bit mad.
pessimizer 2y ago
> The paper examines a world people will pay an AI lawyer $500 to write a document instead of paying a human lawyer $500 to write a document. That will never happen. It's an absurd assumption made by AI investors everywhere. They can't handle a world where everyone already has an AI lawyer at home that they trust, that they have because they once paid $100 for it at a kiosk in the mall or pirated it. The real future is an AI lawyer on your keychain and an extreme devaluation of the skill of knowing the law and making legal arguments. Instead, we're going to have a weirder world where you show up to court and the court already has a list of your best legal arguments that they generated completely independent of you, and they largely match the list of arguments that your own AI advisor app gave you. They'll send you messages regarding your best next steps, and if your own device agrees, all you'll have to do is reply 'Y.' For simple document preparation, I'm pretty sure that your phone will be able to handle it, and AI at the point of submission would be able to give you helpful suggestions if the documents were inadequate. LLMs can almost do things of this degree of difficulty reasonably well now. Where will they be (or their successors be) in 10 years? Why do we think they will be as expensive as lawyers, who you have to send to difficult schools for a long time, feed, and flatter?

farts_mckensy 2y ago

this paper asserts that when "TAI" arrives, human labor is simply replaced by AI labor while keeping aggregate labor constant. it treats human labor as a mere input that can be swapped out without consequence, which ignores the fact that human labor is the source of wages and, therefore, consumer demand. remove human labor from the equation, and the whole thing collapses.

jsemrau 2y ago
Accelerationists believe in a post-scarcity society where the cost of production will be negligible. In that scenario, and I am not a believer, consumer demand would be independent of wages.
- farts_mckensy 2y ago
  In that scenario, wages and money in general would be obsolete.
- riffraff 2y ago
  That makes wealth accumulation pointless so the whole article makes no sense either, right? Tho I guess even post scarcity we'd have people who care about hoarding gold-pressed latinum.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  > consumer demand would be independent of wages That's the literal actual textbook definition of "communism". Lmao that I actually lived to see the day when techbros seriously discuss this.
  - farts_mckensy 2y ago
    That is not the "textbook definition" of communism. You have no idea what you're talking about.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    > Lmao that I actually lived to see the day when techbros seriously discuss this. People have been making comparisons between post scarcity economics and "utopia communism" for decades at this point. This talking point probably predates your birth.

zurfer 2y ago

Given that the paper disappoints, I'd love to hear what fellow HN readers do to prepare? My prep is: 1) building a company (https://getdot.ai https://getdot.ai) that I think will add significant marginal benefits over using products from AI labs / TAI, ASI. 2) investing in the chip manufacturing supply chain: from ASML, NVDA, TSMC, ... and SnP 500. 3) Staying fit and healthy, so physical labour stays possible.

bob1029 2y ago
I'd say #3 is most important. I'd also add: 4) Develop an obsession for the customers & their experiences around your products. I find it quite rare to see developers interacting directly with the customer. Stepping outside the comfort zone of backend code can grow you in ways the AI will not soon overtake. #3 can make working with the customer a lot easier too. Whether or not we like it, there are certain realities that exist around sales/marketing and how we physically present ourselves.
petesergeant 2y ago
4) trying to position myself as an expert in building these systems
- smeeger 2y ago
  [flagged]
ghfhghg 2y ago
2 has worked pretty well for me so far. I try to do 3 as much as possible. My current work explicitly forbids me from doing 1. Currently just figuring out the timing to leave.
sfn42 2y ago
Nothing. I don't think there's anything I need to prepare for. AI can't do my job and I doubt it will any time soon. Developers who think AI will replace them must be miserable at their job lol. At best AI will be a tool I use while developing software. For now I don't even think it's very good at that.

habinero 2y ago

This paper is silly. It asks the equivalent of "what if magic were true" (human-level AI) and answers with "the magic economy would be different." No kidding. FWIW, the author is listed as a fellow of "The Forethought Foundation" [0], which is part of the Effective Altruism crowd[1], who have some cultish doomerism views around AI [2][3] There's a reason this stuff goes up on a non-peer reviewed paper mill. -- [0] https://www.forethought.org/the-2022-cohort https://www.forethought.org/the-2022-cohort [1] https://www.forethought.org/about-us https://www.forethought.org/about-us [2] https://reason.com/2024/07/05/the-authoritarian-side-of-effective-altruism-comes-for-ai/ https://reason.com/2024/07/05/the-authoritarian-side-of-effe... [3] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/29/effective-altruisms-bait-and-switch-from-global-poverty-to-ai-doomerism/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/29/effective-altruisms-bait...

krona 2y ago
The entire philosophy of existential risk is based on a collection of absurd hypotheticals. Follow the money.
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
>It asks the equivalent of "what if magic were true" (human-level AI) and answers with "the magic economy would be different." No kidding. Isn't developing AGI basically the mission of OpenAI et al? What's so bad about considering what will happen if they achieve their mission? >who have some cultish doomerism views around AI [2][3] Check the signatories on this statement: https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk
- habinero 2y ago
  The same reason why there's not hundreds of papers about the benefits of Dyson spheres: without any ability to execute, it's just speculative science fiction. And yes, that link is exactly the behavior I'm talking about. It makes it sound like it's a top issue for all these people. Most of them work at EA-related places, but I spot-checked (really, I did) five people who worked in CS research but not at an EA company. I couldn't find any other public statements that they thought AI was that important. Do they know their names are on this page? Appeal to authority is a classic cult/fraud/misinformation/conspiracist tactic. If it says "so-and-so believes this" and not "so-and-so believes this and here's why", it's suspect.

abtinf 2y ago

Whoever endorsed this author to post on arxiv should have their endorsement privileges revoked.

baobabKoodaa 2y ago

I suspect this is being manipulated to be #1 on HN. Looking at the paper, and looking at the comments, there's no way it's #1 by organic votes.

showmexyz 2y ago
[flagged]
mmooss 2y ago
> looking at the comments Almost everything on HN gets those comments. Look at the top comments of almost any discussion - they will be a rejection / dismissal of the OP.
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  No they're not. As a quick experiment I took the current top 3 stories on HN and looked at the top comment on each: - one is expanding on the topic without expressing disagreement - one is a eulogy - one expresses both agreement on some points and disagreement on other points

ggm 2y ago

Lawyers are like chartered engineers. It's not that you cannot do it for yourself, it's that using them confers certain instances of "insurance" against risk in the outcome. Where does an AI get chartered status, admitted to the bar, and insurance cover?

mmooss 2y ago
I don't think anyone who is an experienced lawyer can do it themselves, except very simple tasks.
- mmooss 2y ago
  Oops - I met 'not an experienced lawyer'. I've gotta proofread.
- ggm 2y ago
  "Do it for yourself" means self-rep in court, and not pay a lawyer. Not, legals doing AI for themselves. They already do use AI for various non stupid things but the ones who don't check it, pay the price when hallucinations are outed by the other side.
  - tyre 2y ago
    Lawyers are the last people who would represent themselves. They know how dumb that is.
smeeger 2y ago
it could be tomorrow. you dont know and the heuristics, which five years ago pointed unanimously to the utter impossibility of this idea, are now in favor of it.

daft_pink 2y ago

Is a small group really going to control AI systems or will competition bring the price down so much that everyone benefits and the unit cost of labor is further and further reduced.

kfarr 2y ago
At home inference is possible now and getting better every day
- sureIy 2y ago
  At home inference by professionals. I don't expect dad to Do Your Own AI anytime soon, he'll still pay someone to set it up and run it.
pineaux 2y ago
I see a few possible scenarios. 1) all work gets done by AI. Owners of AI reap the benefits for a while. There is a race to the bottom concerning costs, but also because people are not earning wages and come ang really afford the outputs of production. Thus rendering profits close to zero. If the people controlling the systems do not give the people "on the bottom" some kind allowance they will not have any chance for income. They might ask horrible and sadistic things from the bottom people but they will need to do something. 2) if people get pushed into these situations they will get riot or start civil wars. "Butlerian jihads" will be quite normal. 3) another scenario is that the society controlled by the rich will start to criminalise non-work in the early stages, that will lead to a new slave class. I find this scenario highly likely. 4) one of the options that I find very likely if "useless" people do NOT get "culled" en mass is an initial period of Revolt followed an AI controlled communist "Utopia". Where people do not need to work but "own" the means of production (AI workers). Nobody needs to work. Work is LARPing and is done by people who act like workers but don't really do anything (like some people do today) A lot of people don't do this, there are still people who see non-workers as leeching of the workers, because workers are "rewarded" by ingame mechanics (having a "better job"). Parallel societies will become normal. Just like now. Rich people will give themselves "better jobs" some people dont play the game and there are no real consequences, but not being allowed to play. 5) an amalgamation of the scenario as above, but in this scenario everybody will be forced to larp with the asset owning class. They will give people "jobs" but these jobs are bullshit. Just like many jobs right now. Jobs are just a way of creating different social classes. There is no meritocracy. Just rituals. Some people get to do certain rituals that give them more social status and wealth. This is based on oligarch whims. Once in a while a revolt, but mostly not needed. Many other scenarios exist of course.

qingcharles 2y ago

What jobs do we think will survive if AGI is achieved? I was thinking religious leaders might get a good run. Outside of say, Futurama, I'm not sure many people will want faith-leadership from a robot?

bad_haircut72 2y ago
I think futurama got AGI exactly right, we will end up living along side robotic AIs that are just as coocoo as us
etiam 2y ago
To the extent that's just a matter of seeming the most compelling, I think they could blow humans out of the water. Add rich reinforcement feedback on what's the most addictive communication and what's superficially experienced as the most profound, and present-day large models could probably be a contender. A good robot body today is probably not far from being competitive as representation, and some holograms might well already be better in some ways. To the extent it requires actual faith it's presently a complete joke, of course, and I expect it will remain so for a long time. But I'd say the quality bar for congregation members is due for a rise.
BarryMilo 2y ago
Why would we need jobs at that point?
- IsTom 2y ago
  Because the kind of people who'll own all the profits aren't going to share.
- jajko 2y ago
  I dont think AI will lead into any form of working communism, so one still has to pay for products and services. It has been tried ad nausea and it always fails to calculate in human differences and flaws like greed and envy, so one layer of society ends up brutally dominating the rest.
- 2y ago

bawolff 2y ago

If the singularity happens, i feel like interest rates will be the least of our concerns.

impossiblefork 2y ago
It's actually very important. If this kind of thing happens, if interest rates are 0.5%, then people on UBI could potentially have access to land and not have horrible lives, if it's 16% as these guys propose, they will be living in 1980s Tokyo cyberpunk boxes.

aquarin 2y ago

There is one thing that AI can't do. Because you can't punish the AI instance, AI cannot take responsibility.

smeeger 2y ago
this boils down to the definition of pain. what is pain? i doubt you know even if you have experienced it. theres no reason to think that even llms are not guided by something that resembles pain.