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Actually you made me think of a fun scenario. A robot, who I will name Robort, over time becomes, say, 1/10th the price of human labor. But they do 10x the wor

Actually you made me think of a fun scenario. A robot, who I will name Robort, over time becomes, say, 1/10th the price of human labor. But they do 10x the work quality and work 10x longer. In that scenario, you could pay them the same wage but produce significantly more economic value. The robot, who won’t care about material possessions or luxuries, could make purchases on behalf of a human - and that human, overworked in 2025 or jobless - has a significant quality of life improvement. Help, an economist or someone smarter, check my math.

coderenegade 1y ago
Yeah, I meant more in the sense of businesses being the primary consumers for everything, but maybe you're right. In the same way that everyone owns a car today, maybe everyone will own one or more robots that do what they otherwise would have done, and get paid on their behalf. I think it's unlikely because machines are a lot more fungible than people, and I don't see businesses offloading ownership of the means of production in that way unless you're also covering hardware and running costs. You would also have to compete with very large corps that will almost certainly own vast worker capacity in the form of frontier ai and robots. But that kind of gets back to my original point, which was that I think the vast majority of economic interaction will be business to business, not just in value (the way it is today) but also in volume. I.e. in the same way that everyone has a license, maybe every family also has a registered household business, for managing whatever assets they own. The time it takes for self hosted models to approach frontier model performance isn't huge, and maybe we see that filter in to households that are able to do decent work at a cheaper rate.
imtringued 1y ago
When you think about it for a moment, you've merely described the relationship between a parent and a child. Children (under the age of 18) are less productive and spend significantly less time doing anything that could be considered work and they don't pay their parents in any significant capacity.
esafak 1y ago
The company that built the robot simply takes the money that would have gone to the human workers. The robots will exert strong downward pressure on wages. Humans will have to look for jobs the robots can't do, and when they fail taxes will make up the difference, else people will revolt.

coderenegade 1y ago

Yeah, I meant more in the sense of businesses being the primary consumers for everything, but maybe you're right. In the same way that everyone owns a car today, maybe everyone will own one or more robots that do what they otherwise would have done, and get paid on their behalf. I think it's unlikely because machines are a lot more fungible than people, and I don't see businesses offloading ownership of the means of production in that way unless you're also covering hardware and running costs. You would also have to compete with very large corps that will almost certainly own vast worker capacity in the form of frontier ai and robots. But that kind of gets back to my original point, which was that I think the vast majority of economic interaction will be business to business, not just in value (the way it is today) but also in volume. I.e. in the same way that everyone has a license, maybe every family also has a registered household business, for managing whatever assets they own. The time it takes for self hosted models to approach frontier model performance isn't huge, and maybe we see that filter in to households that are able to do decent work at a cheaper rate.

imtringued 1y ago

When you think about it for a moment, you've merely described the relationship between a parent and a child. Children (under the age of 18) are less productive and spend significantly less time doing anything that could be considered work and they don't pay their parents in any significant capacity.

esafak 1y ago

The company that built the robot simply takes the money that would have gone to the human workers. The robots will exert strong downward pressure on wages. Humans will have to look for jobs the robots can't do, and when they fail taxes will make up the difference, else people will revolt.