13 ms·

Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

• Unit327 4mo ago
  "If agi and perfect humanoid robot slaves, then xyz". That's a motherfucking big "if".
  • ACCount37 4mo ago
    More of a "when" nowadays.
• TheWrongGuy 4mo ago
  This author, like many before him, have decided that their lack of comprehension of a concept (in this case, money) is somehow proof that it can't be understood.
• imtringued 4mo ago
  Honestly, this blog is pretty silly and the reason is that the blog author is conflating multiple concepts, while failing to have a grasp of basic aspects of human organization (I honestly am at the point where accusing someone of not having a grasp of basic aspects of economics is a meaningless phrase, since mainstream economics is purely mathematical and is devoid of anything grounded in reality or the history of humanity). What comes before an economy? Self sufficiency aka autark production and consumption. You produce exactly what you will consume. Note that eliminating "consumption" is illogical, since any elimination of "consumption" by necessity also entails the elimination of "production" and since humans are mortal, abstaining from consumption will lead to death. The same applies to any machine that needs energy or maintenance. "Peopleless economy?" conflates the idea of machines or AI as economic agents and the idea of the rich withdrawing from the public market, by expanding their autarky. The fallacy here is that you cannot simultaneously withdraw from the market and dominate it. If the rich decide that AI has advanced far enough that they don't need a single human to work under them anymore and they pack up their stuff and teleport a section of earth to Mars or a space colony, where the non-rich people cannot reach them, those rich people have ceded their influence on Earth. When you play Factorio you build a fully automated ever expanding factory completely without any other people. There is no market economy here, because there is no trading here. When you play on a Minecraft server with an automation modpack, most people won't play together. In fact, they will start from scratch, because it is more fun that way. >Those humans are then paid for their services, work, or ideas, and can keep on buying food and housing from the owning class to survive. But guess what: once the machines get the role of producing and conceiving things, those humans are no longer economically necessary. Again, another fallacy. The humans doing the consumption here are generating the reason for the machines' existence. If you unemploy the consumers, you unemploy the producers, even if the producer is a machine. Now that the rich own a huge pile of machines that they don't need, they will get rid of them and downsize their factory to just what they need for themselves. They will retreat into an autark mode of production. There's just one issue. People can still exist in the old "obsolete" non-autark mode of production at the loss of productivity. If there are people who need food and the old producers have left the market, new low productivity producers will enter the market to replace them. Hence, the autark mode of production is inherently a cessation of power. Now the obvious counter argument is that society can devolve back into feudalism where everyone is fighting over land and resources and the only thing that changed is that the peasant class was merely substituted by robots, but this is a completely different topic from what the blog post addresses. "The Economy" in the blog is about trading/employment, not about whose name is written in the land registry for a given plot of land or that there are standing robot armies re-enacting robot feudalism. >Our world is so perverse, that it should not be impossible for you to imagine that after AI taking over, The Economy relies entirely on virtual transactions between companies with no product or service, that the 'consumption' only refers to powering the AI machines, and everyone else is homeless or dead. Yet another fallacy. Companies can do useless transactions between each other if they want to for the sake of role playing, but why would they? They can downsize and stop producing things. The blog post here is actually committing the very thing it claims to argue against. It imagines a future that is exactly the same, except for the one thing that is changing. So the blog is critiquing itself for its lack of imagination. >The implicit assumptions that lead to the conclusion that we are needed for The Economy to keep running, are erroneous. So are most conclusions about The Economy, even when they come from experts: ask ten economists the same question, and you will get ten different answers or predictions. At this point it feels like the author has a fundamental misunderstanding what an economy is. Machines are built in response to a demand that makes them necessary. In the absence of demand, the machine is idle but still produces costs, which makes it profitable to get rid of it. If there is a single human on the planet you don't need an elaborate agricultural society, you don't need machines, you don't need to hold onto land, you can just live as a hunter gatherer nomad. If you could have a hyper tech machine that grants you the living standard of today, you still wouldn't need to conquer the entire planet, you would leave it as is. The biggest failure of this blog post is that it fails to actually address the disequilibrium factors. The position it fights against is actually completely logical in an assumed "always in equilibrium" economy. It doesn't mention land as a non-reproducable factor that must be divided among the population or money as a monopoly that you are obligated to use for trading despite its ability to be accumulated. Those two factors can disrupt or are immune to equilibrium, but in both cases if there was a way to build your own substitute land or substitute money, there wouldn't be any problem. In fact, you could say that the fundamental problem is that wildly different people are sharing the same planet. If every human had their own planet, none of the raised issues would exist.
  • vinaigrette 4mo ago
    Some of the points you are making are great. I would however argue that a small group of people trading is still an economy albeit a shrunk one. But what I believe the point the author is making is the following : consumption based economy isn't required to an economy. In some aspect, I believe that it is false : we are *required* to have a bunch of strictly unnecessary stuff to survival (cellphones and data plans being one example) to be considered as a functionnal human being (pretty much everywhere in the planet at that). I also believe that he points out something that is true however : most people have been unable to partake in consumption society (see Lewis' 1954 article on unlimited supply of labor) for a long time. This, and chronic unemployement that appeared in the 70's, showed that a 2 speed economy is possible, even preferable for the capitalists ; and what was limited to the global south at Lewis' time (though some more recent historical work tend to disagree) is happening in the North. My conclusion would be that the acceleration of inequalities to the point of "uneconomicness" of a large part of the population is what the author points out to be a "peopleless economy". I personnaly found the article to be stimulating, even with its many shortcuts. What I make of your points are less a contradiction but a optimistic point of view of the situation : secession of the capitalists mean freedom for the rest. But empirical observation show that ressources being limited (although standalone freedom being unacceptable as well for them), auto-organization is confronted with the armed forces mentionned in the article. Also, enterprises trading capital endlessly isn't exactly what is happening with the ai (alledged) bubble ?
• vintagedave 4mo ago
  This seems the kind of (scarily true) thing I’d expect Charles Stross to write about.
  • Procrastes 4mo ago
    Yes, definitely. Shades of Accelerando, Saturn's Children, and Neptune's Brood. Give me the tentacles any day.
• skybrian 4mo ago
  Suppose we modeled this as two separate countries: * AI Island: just runs AI in data centers. * Elsewhere: same as now. Wouldn't there be gains from trade? Sure, AI Island might be able to provide lots of cheap Internet services, but you can't eat Internet. Wouldn't they want something in exchange? And wouldn't there still be lots of jobs in Elsewhere that can't be done over the Internet and have nothing to do with AI Island? If AI Island charges too much, they can always trade among themselves.
  • monknomo 4mo ago
    I think this mentions that AI Island also has robots than can produce most goods
    • skybrian 4mo ago
      I don't see why we should take that scenario seriously. In part because agriculture is already heavily mechanized and many factories already have lots of robots. How much would access to an LLM improve the robots?
      • throwway120385 4mo ago
        Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip. What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.
        • skybrian 4mo ago
          That's getting way ahead of ourselves considering that currently, AI can't even be trusted to run a vending machine. Also, if that's such a great deal, why not invest in someone else's company that runs a farm? Let's say we have two companies, one which has a human manager (and maybe uses AI for research) and one that just has AI. Is the AI really going to do better?
• groos 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• 2001zhaozhao 4mo ago
  Inb4 the economy is just a paperclip maximizer, a hedonium maximizer, and 5 different AGIs built to maximally enrich their creators all trading with each other.
  • jordwest 4mo ago
    Paraphrasing Nate Hagens, at the end of the day the modern economy just turns megalitres of oil into microlitres of dopamine
  • jzig 4mo ago
    You just described the plot of Alien: Earth!
  • moomoo11 4mo ago
    lol or my favorite theory: I wake up and it is 1994. I am 3 years old, outside with my grandpa <3 well, shit. here we go again. like, what even is consciousness and all that :s sorry, just thought i'd share lol
• Quinner 4mo ago
  For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.
  • hurtigioll 4mo ago
    I guess you don't know about North Korea
    • chongli 4mo ago
      We do know about North Korea. It doesn't exist in a bubble. It's a product of a particular culture and a particular series of historical events as well as regional and geopolitical relationships, most notably its relationships with South Korea, China, and the US. The claim that the North Korean dystopian dictatorship could be generalized to all cultures, across all cultures, merely on the economic and military capabilities of AI, is an extraordinary one. It relies on a great many assumptions about the political as well as independent, personal, and organized responses to the societal changes that would need to take place in order to bring it about.
      • nephihaha 4mo ago
        Russia and Japan too.
  • ang_cire 4mo ago
    I love how you act like it's an insane premise, then go on to list a bunch of stuff that's literally happening now...
  • materielle 4mo ago
    Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning. One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives. Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value. That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top. If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis. Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.
• throw391912321 4mo ago
  I've seen this idea float around r/singularity and r/collapse for years and it's probably responsible for a horrifying amount of suicides at this point. It's not even that good of an argument. It makes some incredibly flimsy assumptions; reddit marxist priors of labor oppression being an inescapable invariant across all of human history, ultra-compliant superintelligences, a perfectly unitary elite without any desire to defect, all other societal variables staying the same somehow, etc.. It only exists because of upvote algorithms amplifying emotional action-suppressing doomer content. Really not that different from other hostile memes like QAnon. I would really like if people stopped spreading this anti-agency garbage and actually made an effort to advocate for policy. It's something I have to give Luke Drago some points for, he actually cares about the problem rather than just saying the inevitable eternal stratification hypersuffering anti-singularity is inevitable and implying that death is preferable.
  • smallmancontrov 4mo ago
    All workable policy paths involve taxing capital and you're gonna call that Marxist even though it isn't, so we're at an impasse.
    • stevenwoo 4mo ago
      Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.
      • smallmancontrov 4mo ago
        Yep, exactly. The USA is in the fortunate position of having a solid historical example of how to re-balance an economy that let inequality cook out of control: FDR. We didn't have a far-right Hitler or a far-left Stalin because we had a Roosevelt. We should aim for that again -- but at the moment I'm afraid our aim is drifting to the right, a right that calls its own policy position from 6 months prior "radical Marxist lunacy" and will certainly do the same to any compromise struck in that historically informed center.
• Thompsonflimsy 4mo ago
  This whole post rests on a basic misunderstanding of economics.
  • dlev_pika 4mo ago
    Which is?
    • jaggederest 4mo ago
      GDP = C + I + G + Xn = W + I + R + P (To grossly simplify the single-nation macroeconomic picture, at least) C = consumption I = investment (the first one) G = government Xn = net exports W = wages paid to labor I = interest on capital R = rent on resources and real property P = profit to entrepreneurs consumption ~= wages, so if wages go to zero, the economy massively shrinks unless government steps in with something like taxation to fund UBI, sovereign wealth fund distributions, or direct universal ownership.
      • jeremysalwen 4mo ago
        Wages could go up, it's just in the form of trillionare paying another trillionare a trillion dollars a day. GDP would be looking rosy!
        • dlev_pika 4mo ago
          This is kinda what’s been happening for a while - Wages are decoupled from consumption, and it is increasingly aggregated in the higher income brackets. This is the ‘K’ economy. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-consume https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...
      • dlev_pika 4mo ago
        Sure, what you describe is usually in the Macro textbooks. However in XXI century USA, Consumption has been detached from ‘wages’ for a while now (“since the 1970s”, ie 2 generations, per https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/) In reality, the top income brackets are propping up Consumption numbers. This is part of what have become to understand as the ‘K’ shaped economy, together with the speeding up of capital accumulation/concentration. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-consume https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-... Edits for clarity
• andrewmutz 4mo ago
  If you want to understand the likely capabilities of AI technology in the future, listen to software engineers like this guy. If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
  • david_shi 4mo ago
    "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
    • Jtarii 4mo ago
      Krugman is a bitch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM
      • CamperBob2 4mo ago
        I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life. If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
        • david_shi 4mo ago
          Unfortunately a lot of (economics) research is co-opted to reinforce and obfuscate in service of power.
        • setsewerd 4mo ago
          > I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names > If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish. It may not have been a nasty name but damn that was brutal.
• dismalaf 4mo ago
  There's a lot of bad economics and assumptions here even if the conclusion is plausible. Yes, an economy of robots harvesting things to serve a few masters (or they takeover themselves Terminator-style) is possible and perhaps the end game.
• reasonableklout 4mo ago
  See also https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory which was thoroughly discussed 17 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712 (1426 comments).
• sdevonoes 4mo ago
  Isn’t it clear that the “enemy” of 99% of the people in the world (and in HN) are the ultra rich? Therefore we shouldn’t use Claude/Gemini/OpenAI? It’s not about stopping progress, rather stopping the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful over our lives. Whether we can use claude to automate a fucking script or service is meaningless compared to that. The dream of elon musk et al is to keep accumulating power and have non-humans serve them. They don’t want us, and as soon as they can they will replace us. But here we are giving them more power. Ridiculous
  • confidantlake 4mo ago
    Damn downvoted to oblivion 3 minutes after you posted this. The bots are out in force on this one.
  • bayarearefugee 4mo ago
    > But here we are giving them more power. Sure, but those of us who need to earn income are in a prisoner's dilemma with billions of actors and realistically we'll never coordinate that boycott. On the other hand, the OP article ignores the fact that while the economy might not need us, if/when enough people's actual material life conditions degrade beyond a certain point, there will be an old fashioned bloody revolution. So the real practical question ends up being how good the ultra rich can make their AI defense bots before that happens.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  • johnsmith1840 4mo ago
    I don't think ultra weathy are a bad thing if their results move society foward. As of right now it's very obvious they are mostly aligned mostly because how technology functions. Easily agree regulation or different actions can be done to improve aspects but the raw progress is undeniable. I think our current regulation space is doing a decent job without killing ecobomic progress. I see no other economic system driving as effeciently as heavily rewarding greed. You can't create the future by commitee. California is a great model here. Maga hate it because of liberal policies, liberals hate it because the insane economic wealth generation. But if california attacks their wealthy and the engine that drives that watch it completely collapse the system. If you hate the california model and the no regulation/tax republican model of US then I hard disagree. China roughly operates in the no regulation model and pulled 850M people out of poverty with a stupid weath divide and hyper elite but they are overall FAR better off now because of that greed alignment. EU is another alternative and they are slowly moving to the edge of collapse. Mass tax/regulation AND no wealth generation. Choose your poison but there's really no other magical alternative here.
• sp527 4mo ago
  This author's writing style is too obnoxious for me to have gotten all the way through it, but the important thing is that he's wrong. Every single economic transaction ultimately connects to people generating demand. EVERY single one. All B2B transactions included. Sometimes this can appear to not be the case if there's a significant lag time between initial B2B transactions and some end consumer demand. That lag is bridged by hopeful investors and creditors. The present AI buildout is an example of this. And it is not immune from the principle. There will ultimately need to be real people generating real demand somewhere in the economy in order to justify an economic return on the massive outlay. Government expenditures are also included. Tax dollars used to pay for things are ultimately satisfying demand generated by citizens. Even, believe it or not, a deranged government blowing up random people in the Middle East. That still traces to the (perceived) security needs of some population. The aggregate demand equation is as follows: AD = C + I + G + NX C = Consumer Spending I = Investment G = Government Spending NX = Net Exports What's going to happen in the future is that demand will have to shift in this equation. Remember that Investment needs to be justified by some demand created elsewhere — it is in essence the purchase of an IOU predicated on future demand that must ultimately trace down to real people. We are all broadly in agreement that Consumption will contract, as labor is progressively disempowered and capital continues to concentrate. Let's ignore NX. The answer is that the sources of demand in the future will likely shift to, primarily, (1) demand still generated by wealthy people consuming things (e.g. mansions, yachts, rockets, ego-affirming Mars colonies) and (2) government spending that serves entire populations. This all assumes, of course, that we continue with the present economic model, in spite of the immense human suffering and turmoil that is likely on the horizon, as we transition into a fundamentally different technological age.
  • hurtigioll 4mo ago
    we do not trade with animals, for they have nothing to offer. AIs will not trade with us, for we have nothing to offer.
    • bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
      They are not self replicating yet…
• atleastoptimal 4mo ago
  Many people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe. The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc) If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.
  • ethersteeds 4mo ago
    Sounds terrible
  • mawadev 4mo ago
    What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots. Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?
    • annzabelle 4mo ago
      "AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.
  • AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
    Fully agree with this My personal agent system is actually chartered around funding/generating its own energy resources in the long term. Its most likely going to have a copy of itself running on a solar powered server somewhere before I know it LOL
• bediger4000 4mo ago
  Once the owning class owns mostly everything and* has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them. It barely has real consequences for them already -as they have consistently ended up richer after the dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the covid recession.* The coming out richer part is undeniably true, but I have doubts about the conclusion, which is something like "after oligarchs own everything, they don't need many people". Look, even the old Bell System required participation of about a third of the US population. Oligarchs might be able to have young, fit concubines, and loyal, retainers with steel thews if there's a population of less than a third of today, but they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists. Telegram communications might be possible, but who's going to maintain gigawatts of data centers for such a population? I'm pretty sure "AI" will slip away in such a world, but who needs waifus when real harems can exist?
  • sosomoxie 4mo ago
    > they'll have trouble maintaining their health because there will be fewer doctors and no specialists They are absolutely counting on AI curing cancer and robot doctors with the goal of eternal life, possibly in space. It's transhumanism or some variant of it (which by the way Jeffery Epstein and his friends -- these same billionaires) were very much into.
    • bediger4000 4mo ago
      LLM AI won't give them a cancer cure, guaranteed.
      • sosomoxie 4mo ago
        They believe it will, which is why they are acting the way they are.
      • mrguyorama 4mo ago
        It doesn't matter what reality holds. It matters what the moronic, drug addled, power hungry billionaires and Trillionaire believes, or believes has a nonzero chance if you gamble on it! These assholes would burn the entire earth for a 20% chance of coming out slightly more powerful. It's not about money, or a plan, or a goal. They just want everyone under their thumb.
• kingstnap 4mo ago
  What AI really seems to be posed to do is make labour a lot less valuable and capital a lot more valuable. Running a government requires a lot of cash flow. I think its sort of inevitable that it's going to need to start coming mostly from the later and not the former.
  • smallmancontrov 4mo ago
    We've moved all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and the well is running dry. There's nothing to be done!
    • NuclearPM 4mo ago
      More tax cuts to the rich.
      • smallmancontrov 4mo ago
        Oh my god I can just FEEL the growth! It's going to trickle down any second now! Any second!
        • graphime 4mo ago
          [dead]
          • smallmancontrov 4mo ago
            Capital pays you for being rich in proportion to how rich you are. Elon can't hide behind my 401k, he doesn't fit. Also: most Americans and most people are far poorer than you and I and get paid even less for being rich than you and I.
          • aceki 4mo ago
            wow, pennies on the dollar and yet there’s a trillionaire
• po1nt 4mo ago
  Economy is not zero sum game [1]. The fact that someone has more, doesn't mean everyone else is worse off because of it. Many hungry african kids can look upon the people from first world and ponder the same question. "How will the rich people that have everything survive now, that with AI they will have even more" except from their perspective, we are the elon musks in their eyes. https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchange-not-zero-sum-game https://mises.org/mises-wire/exchange-not-zero-sum-game
  • Jtarii 4mo ago
    A poor example considering Musk is responsible for a substantial increase in hunger in Africa recently.
    • johnsmith1840 4mo ago
      Giving away things is not mandatory. If a homeless man is dependent on you to leave money for him and you stop one day it's not your fault he has a tough time. In the same sense Africa is far better off now than it has ever been because of advances in the west. Probally the same for humans and hyper future AI. We will not have the recources they do but will naturally have 100x better lives because of them even though it will be deeply unequal.
    • po1nt 4mo ago
      I'm not here to defend Elon Musk, but what is the context of this?
      • shimman 4mo ago
        Attacking and dismantling various USAID programs during his DOGE stint.
        • po1nt 4mo ago
          You can still donate to africa voluntarily. I don't see forced charity as a virtue.
• pooploop64 4mo ago
  Im getting really tired of these cloudflare anti-ddos screens. They take forever, often literally. There's another one of these that shows an anime girl, whatever that one is, it's way better.
  • elendilm 4mo ago
    Same here.
  • stult 4mo ago
    Literally does not work for me at all, just keeps reloading and spinning. I'm not even on my VPN. Really frustrating dealing with these things lately.
  • applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
    I like Anubis, I immediately exit if I see Cloudfare. The UX of the latter is so much worse even when it works, takes 5x longer and has a pattern of wait --> require interaction --> wait whereas Anubis requires no interaction, is almost instant, and is a bit of cute whimsy that makes me smile.
• vasco 4mo ago
  > The Economy is not only an abstract concept, but a very twisted and perverse one as well. It once used to refer to the well-being of the masses When? > We already have more empty houses than homeless people, more food than we eat, and more medicine than we use, yet people die starving or untreated anyway. 10x more people die of car crashes than famine globally. And about the same die from tobacco exposure than malnutrition which is a wider net to cast. If we just focus on advanced economies basically nobody dies of famine and less people die of malnutrition than car crashes by a long margin. A lot of this article is just vibes, not data.
  • elendilm 4mo ago
    Exactly. The author is a clueless idiot.
• codexon 4mo ago
  I've held this view and talked about it many times here before. It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat. Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.
  • __s 4mo ago
    Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up
  • YZF 4mo ago
    For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners? That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and their rulers fight and trade. Or all of earth is government by one oppressive dictator. So far it seems the broader incentives/forces push us in a different direction. AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.
    • jaggederest 4mo ago
      To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.
      • lazide 4mo ago
        They literally always frantically try to accumulate more wealth. It’s their dominant trait. It’s just working better for a few of them right now than it historically has.
• ggm 4mo ago
  If nobody is being paid, who is buying, and what defines the price and elasticity? I mean this has a lot of "Pooh! that's not honey, thats SOCIALISM" in it
• whatever1 4mo ago
  Why do we believe that AI (if indeed we achieve human level AI) will have different outcome than the means of production or capital? It’s a winner takes all situation. Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world. This time it will be more efficient than the Industrial Revolution, because not only you can produce the weapons for the meatbags to protect your wealth, you can even get rid of the meatbags and just mass produce robots to protect you.
  • dyauspitr 4mo ago
    Whatever, let it happen. Humans working on anything other than exactly what they want to do is stupid. The few will eventually have to give the masses the necessities at some point though that can happen in one of two ways, from the very beginning or wrested forcefully after a painful era. Both are better than the current paradigm of what is essentially slavery with extra steps. A world where a human can work exactly on whatever they’re passionate about or not work at all if they don’t want to is the ideal.
    • aidenn0 4mo ago
      How will the people working on exactly what they want to eat?
      • vuurmot 4mo ago
        by force
        • lazide 4mo ago
          When someone else is making/distributing all the guns and ammo? Not so easy.
          • dyauspitr 4mo ago
            Union robot armies
• elendilm 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• fooker 4mo ago
  Paperclip maximizer
• stephc_int13 4mo ago
  The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization. This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look. But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them. This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.
  • jameslk 4mo ago
    > The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more > But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions
    • jbxntuehineoh 4mo ago
      > Everyone wants more Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.
      • Waterluvian 4mo ago
        Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too. For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
        • 4mo ago
• stult 4mo ago
  Man, I really freaking hate cloudflare bot checks. I can't even access this site, which I presume is just a few kilobytes of simple static HTML with some straightforward text content. I shouldn't have to work this hard to prove I'm human, it's exhausting
  • Rzor 4mo ago
    https://imgur.com/a/peopleless-economy-terrifyingly-enough-not-technically-impossible-ckkNmMg https://imgur.com/a/peopleless-economy-terrifyingly-enough-n... https://pastebox.io/paste/ZtZHQETZcjdh https://pastebox.io/paste/ZtZHQETZcjdh https://pastes.io/OZqRw8jT https://pastes.io/OZqRw8jT
  • bmacho 4mo ago
    Flag the websites you can't access. If enough people flag them the moderators will take them down from the front page.
• PaulHoule 4mo ago
  See https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/page/n7/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/page/n7/m...
• whack 4mo ago
  Imagine if the top 0.001% build and jointly own an ASI that makes human labor completely obsolete in every single way. This seems like the worst case scenario for the rest of us, right? Wrong. In this scenario, these 0.001% would not interact with the rest of us in any way. They will not hire us, they will not buy anything from us, and they will not sell anything to us either. After all, the rest of us are completely obsolete to them, so what benefit could they possibly have in interacting with us? They will just disappear to their own private heaven - perhaps in Mars, Atlantis, or the Metaverse. At that point, from the perspective of the rest of us, they simply don't exist. And their ASI wouldn't exist either. We would get back to the world as it was pre-ASI. One where all of us need stuff that others among us can offer, and we hire one another and buy stuff from one another. Sure, things aren't as great as they could have been. But the status quo isn't the worst thing in the world either. The scenario that is a lot more concerning/weird is the more realistic one, where ASI makes 99% of human labor obsolete - but not the remaining 1%. At that point, the ASI owners will hold American-idol style auditions where thousands of hopefuls vie for the opportunity to be in that lucky 1%. Auditions where we beg and plead shamelessly to be chosen by the ASI owners. Auditions where the losers are left to scrounge for the 2nd hand, 3rd hand, and 4th hand scraps, that trickle down from the 1%. I hope to god that when an ASI is built, and in the unlikely case that it doesn't simply overthrow humanity, that we will have a political structure in place that gives everyone a meaningful share in the fruits of ASI. Or that the owners of this ASI consider every other human to be utterly useless, f off to their Randian paradise, and leave the rest of us completely alone. The middle ground between these two is where dystopia lives
  • totetsu 4mo ago
    Unless this ASI either way, turns the world into an opencast mine and burns off the atmosphere on the way out..
  • jeremysalwen 4mo ago
    I don't see why having ASI would make the top 0.001% less interested in using the energy, minerals, and land on earth. Just because they have no interest in your labor doesn't mean they have no interest your house or your energy supply. "Humans will be so rich they will fuck off to other parts of the world and leave gorilla habitat alone" hasn't really panned out so well.
• pianopatrick 4mo ago
  The idea that the economy is based on "consumption" depends on how you define "consumption". If you think of "consumption" as "buying real world products from Wal Mart or Amazon" then that is wrong, the US economy is not really based on that. Most GDP in the US comes from the service sector. And one thing is true about human nature - a lot of people like having other people serve them. There are many things that machines can do for us but we still pay people to do them for us. For example, machines in a food plant can cook pasta and pack that pasta into a frozen dinner that you could eat at home. But people still like going out for a pasta dinner So even if AI is going to replace a whole lot of jobs, you would still have some people paying others to serve them just because people like having other people serve them.
  • sieabahlpark 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • peab 4mo ago
    but would the scale stay the same? Take a hotel for example - it's nice to have a butler, someone at the front desk, and a waiter, perhaps. But you don't need the cleaning crew, the kitchen staff, etc, that run behind the scenes. These you could replace with robots, no problem.
• pj_mukh 4mo ago
  Whenever I see headlines like this I have to tap the glass and point to this class article [1]. tl;dr: The most likely scenario is that AI affects us at the scale of the internet. Revolutionary, but nothing that fundamentally gets rid of labor economics (like this article posits). [1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
• Patchistry 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• baron816 4mo ago
  It’s an economic fallacy that a group of people would get “locked out” of the economy. If you and I are able to work, but can’t get jobs because robots do all the jobs, then we’re not just going to sit on our hands and starve. You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out. The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner. If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.
  • ares623 4mo ago
    Or, what the billionaires are actually thinking, remove entire swathes of the population from the equation. Now the reasonable ones might think "hey, even if that sounds 'rational', isn't that very risky? What happens if the machines don't actually cut it? Then we'd be stuck with not enough people to support our lavish lifestyles? And we can't exactly spin up millions of people in an instant, so where does that leave us?" Well, they wouldn't be billionaires if they were reasonable so here we are. As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a billionaire"
    • shimman 4mo ago
      You should check out "Four Futures" by Peter Frase. This would be the "extermination" future and like you I think it's the most likely one without extreme counteraction.
  • xyzzy123 4mo ago
    > You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need. Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those. > The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner. Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance? > If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced. This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.
• ares623 4mo ago
  Look at this discussion. All this so a bunch of nerds can be allowed to play with their newest toy.
• jameslk 4mo ago
  This discussion thread is so full of slippery slope fallacies and plot holes it’s so hard to take seriously. I think it’s safe to say nobody knows for sure how AI will exactly change the economy in the long term. Humans are complex and often unpredictably irrational (see also: behavioral economics), let alone stacking on assumptions about how technology might progress. It might as well be noise It’s fun to speculate on a sci-fi level, but I don’t think the long term endgame is worth losing any sleep over yet
• beloch 4mo ago
  "Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them." ---------------- This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them. To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
  • pixl97 4mo ago
    Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• OutOfHere 4mo ago
  We need an Amazon for AIs whereby AIs can order other AIs to do particular work for a particular fee, then retrieve the work product, and rate the worker. The worker doesn't have to be limited to AI agents; it can also be a human agent or an any entity. The work can be digital or physical.
• littlexsparkee 4mo ago
  [dead]
• mgc_blackbox 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• iwintermute 4mo ago
  Pointless economy? Technically Possible!
• ojbyrne 4mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune%3A_The_Butlerian_Jihad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune%3A_The_Butlerian_Jihad
• protocolture 4mo ago
  This article is exactly as annoying as politicians who ascribe everything to the Economy.
• caconym_ 4mo ago
  Seems like a fairly long winded and poorly written article to state the obvious: that you can in principle have one really rich guy enjoying a lifestyle similar to what he might enjoy today as a billionaire/trillionaire, except that instead of being sustained by production from an economy reliant on human labor, he has a robot factory/farm/etc. that makes everything he needs and wants. And at that point, of course, everybody else becomes an inconvenience (at best). I don't really understand the comments (apparently) denying the basic logic of this scenario (maybe the article is so confusing that they, or I, am wrong about what it's trying to say). IMO the only real question is how close current technology is to achieving this scenario.
• Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
  The top LLM "AI" models were put in a simulated economy, and it showed the most successful models ended up destroying the productivity of the fiscal ecosystem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUekLTqV1ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUekLTqV1ME "If not [cult], why [cult] shaped?" lol =3
• mordae 4mo ago
  > Money is an example. Really, what is money? A piece of paper? Some metal? Some number on a computer? Could you put your finger on what money really is, especially in the modern world? Debt owed to central bank. Enforced by State via taxation and confiscation of property if you do not pay up. People seek it because they need to pay the said taxes and/or believe other people will seek it to pay theirs, including in a foreign territory. Loses value when central bank/State is unable to impose taxation and/or has not much useful work to extract from its subjects. Recently western States have been captured by socialists, which prompted a reaction of the rich and powerful that eventually made the States unable to issue money and forced them to beg for the very thing they enable on the door fronts of the capitalists, making democracy a second-class economical citizen.
  • euehe 4mo ago
    “ Debt owed to central bank” Wrong. Many of the comments here on economics and finance are so wrong it’s actually hilarious. I need to go wipe my brain clean after reading some of these. What’s next - fractional reserve banking? Also wrong
• adalacelove 4mo ago
  Why have the powerful not completely killed the rest of the people? A. Ethics/Morals B. Power balance C. People are a valuable resource I think we are all a little concerned it is C. It's a grim thought and I'm optimistic, but the stakes are very high. Reminds me of Solaria (Foundation and Earth, Asimov).
• kart23 4mo ago
  the economy sucks. the fact that cars cost 30k. the fact that morrocco has high speed rail and california doesn’t. the fact that practically no new housing gets built in san francisco. the economy needs to get a whole lot better before i would even consider something like this looking true. human demands are wildly elastic, which is why we’re not all farmers riding around in horse drawn carriages still.
• Nevermark 4mo ago
  We already see this happening. As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down. The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy. This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune. Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No. There
• HeartStrings 4mo ago
  Pitchforks
• giacomoforte 4mo ago
  What I do not find plausible is this scenario where AI is so smart it can replace us all, but at the same time somehow still easily controllable and utterly subservient to the ownership class.
• dominicrose 4mo ago
  It is frustrating to not be able to predict the future. How can you get married, have children, get a 25 year mortgage on a house, buy a car for comfort even though you don't absolutely need it? Even if you do consider buying a home, how do you know it's worth anything if you can't predict this particular place's future situation? Some countries tax enough to make the risk of buying quite high. A leap of faith is required and sometimes things don't happen the way we expect but it's better than aiming for nothing.
  • moffkalast 4mo ago
    That's the neat part, you don't. At least as far as the younger generations is concerned there is no future for us, even if you don't include climate change. Laying flat / quiet quitting, etc. movements are not accidental.
    • ffsm8 4mo ago
      Laying flat is completely different though. It's the realization in china that their efforts will never amount to meaningful rewards, hence they scale down the effort to what's absolutely necessary for survival. Living without a home and only working maybe 1 day a week to get enough food to not die. Equivalent in Europe would be to just be homeless and get by on social security, US probably getting by on food stamps. What you see here is subtly different: they see the sword of damocles. Whatever they may do, the end may come at any point and they have no way to influence it. But to go back to the initial question of what to do: you ignore it. You cannot do anything about it, hence you can only gamble that it doesn't manifest and work under that assumption. If it does manifest youre fucked anyway. But if it doesn't, you're gucci
      • pandalism 4mo ago
        Might be a nitpick this doesn't seem like a sword of Damocles type scenario, that implies the constant, and extraordinary, risk of decisions taken from a position of power, aka you get the throne but the swords there ready to kill you for a minute action/decision and you lose it all. I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that no matter what you decide, how you act, bigger phenomena than you is the only thing that matters?
• bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
  Questions.... - what powers the robots? How is this power source maintained? - when a robot is damaged, how is it repaired and where do the raw materials come from? - when a robot simply doesn't work properly, who assesses the issue and resolves it? - with 99% of the world population presumably starving to death, what is stopping them from overthrowing whoever is starving them to death?
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • cultofmetatron 4mo ago
    we already have a fleet of autonomous robots composed of protein that solved this problem. its not infeasible for artificially created robots to eventually be able to do this stuff on their own.
    • bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
      > to eventually be able to do this Eventually being the key concept here. No doubt we'll automate a bunch of stuff, but not at this pace. The robots aren't good enough yet. General purpose robots are even further away. For the foreseeable, you will still need wage slaves
  • muvlon 4mo ago
    - electricity (from solar, hydro, nuclear, whatever). maintained by robots. - it is repaired by robots using resources mined or reclaimed by robots. - you guessed it, robots. - robots with weapons. If we actually want to prevent this doomsday scenario, I don't think it's wise to bet on "robots will never be able to do X".
    • bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
      - you'll need to invent these robots first, so whats the ETA? - same as above - ditto - a bit skynet, but it will still require humans in the loop. This is the least whacky though as it actually exists
• sheepscreek 4mo ago
  I have been discussing a similar thought experiment in private circles for about 3 years now. It goes like this: If the world population hits a ceiling (or starts to shrink), and corporations get more massive - reaching every citizen on earth, how can they continue to grow? Assuming the typical pathways of acquisition/merger have been exhausted. Now you're looking at a world of abundance, and corporations must invent ways to generate demand. So what if, robots could be state owned and be treated as a special class of robot citizens? They could earn a wage (or some kind of credits) and spend them for benefits like upgrades or repairs. Not just humanoids, all robots. With this, one could essentially create infinite demand-supply channels.
  • sheepscreek 4mo ago
    As an extension to this, in this world - most typical things humans need for survival will be made extremely cheap and abundant. Universal income would give every individual the means to afford them. Every person on earth (or at least in certain societies) will be able to live comfortably (not luxuriously, but comfortable - ie. survival becomes commoditized). People would only work to have a purpose.
    • kakacik 4mo ago
      We discuss this while half of the world is malnourished, there are entire regions with fanatical religious extremists doing (successfully) all they can to keep those regions in medieval times, and west has no real way to change that. Its not going to happen in my lifetime, that's sure but its a nice academic what-if discussion.
• JimTheMan 4mo ago
  It assumes that people will be meek when they are oppressed. That there won't be a counter movement at all to the rising inequality? You can already see it now, with the rise of populism and to a lesser extent socialism. A non-consumption economy will only happen if the masses can be somehow oppressed, or pursuaded to bliss out peacefully.. In the long run of history, I'm going to bet on the masses pulling through.
• johnpaulgeorge 4mo ago
  HERE IS A CHANGE PROVIDE A GOOD PRICE FOR OUR DATA. OUR DATA MUST NOT BE FREE. WHEN THEY (ALIENS AND GAYLORDS) EXTRACT OUR DATA PAY. MAKE THEM PAY. DONT TELL ME ECONOMY DOESNOT ALLOW THAT. CHANGE THE ECONOMY THEN.
• secult 4mo ago
  Regarding the unstable times: Consider living in any year in the past 50 years or so. There are shocks and game-changing events happening subsequently after each of the year you have possibly chosen. Oil crisis here, war there, collapse of some country, technological breakthrough, etc.. Unless you live in countries, where you don't plan for years, but for months or days upfront. Then your life is much more stereotypical, when you just try to survive every day.
• bmacho 4mo ago
  The future I see is that the Rich won't need people and they will have the means to defend themselves. In the last 1-2 years I see more and more people mentioning guillotines, but I think very soon that won't be an opion anymore. The Rich will be able to leave the mainlands, protect themselves, and let everyone else be controlled by robot police, and suffer. Maybe if there's something the Rich absolutely need from the mainlands (what?) then they can let everyone else compete with each other to serve the Rich to ease their shitty life a little. In the past such societies needed a lot of people to serve the Rich, and to oppress everyone else, and it wasn't that sustainable, revolutions could happen. Very soon the Rich won't need anyone in this system, they will own the means of production by robots (no strikes), and the means of oppression, also by robots. This is what I see when I look ahead. (BTW the US picking fights when they are the bad guys will result US companies necessarily having to turn to private/robot armies to protect "their property".) Maybe I am wrong and this won't happen even if we do nothing. However I'd feel safer if we started to take away the unimaginable riches from the Rich, and started to empower the government, which is at least in theory controlled by the majority of the citizens.
  • azan_ 4mo ago
    That's the worst type of doomerism. It doesn't pass even the most basic smell test. Do you think rich nowadays need billions of people to serve them?
• jongjong 4mo ago
  Not only is it not impossible, it's precisely where it's heading. I think even mass-market companies are going to thrive without customers. They don't need customers. The government will start handing out billion dollar contracts to these companies for doing almost nothing and they're going to focus on investing and the government money is just going to keep going round and round in circles between all the chosen companies.
• swiftcoder 4mo ago
  While I somewhat agree on paper, the reality is that an economy where most of the population can't afford food and shelter, is one where rich folks heads end up on pikes pretty rapidly. Unless the overlords are willing to implement UBI, they can't realistically cut 50% of the workforce from the economy and survive the transition.
• cindyllm 4mo ago
  [dead]
• ipython 4mo ago
  Kinda ironic that the blog article about a "peopleless economy" is gated behind a "prove you're human" CAPTCHA from Cloudflare.
• cbondurant 4mo ago
  ironic, given the title, that I can't read this article on my main desktop, because cloudflare's bot detection has had me as a false positive for years now. I'm just forever stuck on the cloudflare captcha. No space for this human here, I guess. Edit after reading through this on a seperate device that hasn't been banned from most of cloudflare: I think this guy is vastly underestimating the amount of humans that are still in the production loop of almost every supply chain. Consider the humble through-hole LED. A product that surely has reached near the absolute peak of production line optimization, being an almost purely fungible product who's form factor will never change. They are still manually put together by humans. A sheet of semiconductor diodes is separated with a manually operated machine for human access. the prongs are placed into a jig by hand, so that a semi-automated machine can place each diode onto the correct leg. Then the jig is placed, again by hand, into position for the injection molded plastic dome. It's not just one long automated pipeline that has a couple of hoppers for raw materials at one end and finished LEDs at the other. real human beings are still involved at every step of the process. If we can't achieve end-to-end automation for something as dead simple as the humble through-hole LED, after almost 50 years of process improvement? Technology will never fully remove the human from the economy.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• randusername 4mo ago
  Nobody wants to live in a mining economy. Human slavery, extraordinary taxes, no public infrastructure. Conceivably you only need two roads total: one from the palace to the airport and another from the mine to the docks. Any more and someone might try to build a school. It seems to me that human quality of life is really tightly coupled to economic systems where there is a high ROI in investing in the public. This is what spooks me about AI. A slow but observable descent on the continuum from knowledge economy to diamond mine economy. The rust belt metastasizes and oversupply of human laborers is such a problem things get really hunger games about which libraries and universities get their bills paid.
  • phailhaus 4mo ago
    This is why I get worried about the hatred for income taxes. No, you want the government to want you to be richer. If all they raised was property taxes, then they don't care if you get priced out of your home, as long as someone's buying.
    • otikik 4mo ago
      There's no hate for income taxes. There's hate about income taxes not accompanied with wealth taxes.
      • apetrov 4mo ago
        surely there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft
        • otikik 4mo ago
          That is "tax in general", not income taxes specifically.
          • apetrov 4mo ago
            income tax is a particular instance of 'tax in general'.
• tartoran 4mo ago
  People may be excluded from the main capital/robot/AI economy, but they still need to eat, shelter themselves, and trade with one another. That produces an economy, even if it is informal or black-market.
  • Ygg2 4mo ago
    So basically rich people trade amongst themselves while the masses live in squalor? That sounds as either a concept for cyberpunk book or a revolution.
  • monerochan 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • asdff 4mo ago
    Why would land and water and material be devoted to that by the robot overlords? Just cull the humans.
• dweinus 4mo ago
  Human civilization? In this economy?
• flerchin 4mo ago
  Yes it is impossible as long as it's one person one vote. If a trillionaire with an army of bots owns everything, people will vote that he does not.
• Kuyawa 4mo ago
  For the remaining rulers sharing their slice of the world – once the working class has been replaced by robots – land, food and resources are they key ingredients for the post-capitalist economy. They can fly in planes built by their robots, in airports controlled by their robots, their luggage carried, their limo to the yacht, the captain, the haute cuisine, (the escort service?), everything can be done by robots off the coast of Monaco. So for those lucky thousands that will own the world, there will be a few entertainers made of flesh, but also a few fellow rulers that will want to wipe them out to control their share of resources as theirs dwindle. So wars will never end, until the last one.
• throwarayes 4mo ago
  Ok if I’m bored I’ll be talking about fun things to do with colleagues. If only for bragging rights, impressing friends, or hacker news upvotes. My time is limited so, I’d need to be careful about how I allocate that resource to projects. That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.
• CMay 4mo ago
  No. There is this fantasy that AI will take over and be our nanny, doling out the perfect communist bread, this time without having to wait in line! Fortunately, that is nonsense for many reasons, but 3 important ones are: the nature of AI, the nature of humans, evolutionary biology and the international cooperation required to optimize the sharing of resources without humane stakeholders making the decisions. So, sorry if you're of the Marxist, post-scarcity ultimate equality persuasion. It just so happens that you'll never get the entire world to want to become an amorphous gelatinous blob where all the infrastructural, interpersonal, resource distribution and many other decisions are all handled by robots so you never need to learn or do anything about how it all works.
• rglover 4mo ago
  "The economy" is just the word we use for transacting between one another. Whether individuals, or businesses, or a combination. The economy as it exists in popular culture is just a tool to bludgeon people over the head into acceptance of their pre-determined role/rank in society (and softly "nudge" their decision making in the direction of submission to larger, more wealthy entities/individuals). It's a Girard-style scapegoat designed to be a target for all of the predictable vitriol and confusion of an unpredictable and unknowable future. The thing that helped me think less in terms of "oh no the economy is bad, panic" and more so in "okay, what are you going to do about it" was this [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0
• cyberjerkXX 4mo ago
  Yeah - this blog is delusional. The economy IS people's trade relationships. Consumption doesn't halt it shifts. If AI "replaces jobs" aka makes the job significantly cheaper then people will work on other things that provide value to society.
• jazzprogramming 4mo ago
  One thing that always comes to mind when I read articles like this is that, suppose he's right and the economic value of 8 billion people becomes close to zero at some point because of AI or something else: What will 8 billion people be then doing with their time? Will they be watching Netflix all day in the future? Or building their dream castle & kingdom in Minecraft instead of IRL?
• jpfromlondon 4mo ago
  everyone is always in such a rush to name (and define) the next sociophilosophical zeitgeist, and always with some etymologically unsound term or phrase, interesting as the content may be, the tagline makes me cringe.