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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 si
by 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 agoWhatever, 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 agoHow will the people working on exactly what they want to eat?
- mc32 4mo agoI think everyone who is able should earn their keep. From ants to lions, to survive and live, even if in meager spurts they must put in some work.
- sosomoxie 4mo agoOnly if wealth will be evenly distributed, otherwise you're just enriching someone else.
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoWould you accept "fairly" distributed instead of "evenly"? I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly? Jobs that require special skills and training, or require taking on more responsibility? I don't think the problem is that some work earns different amounts of money. To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands, because the people doing the work are not being compensated fairly
- sosomoxie 4mo agoI would prefer "evenly" but "fairly" would be better than what we have now. If AI and robots are going to make infinite progress and replace all labor, then I definitely would want "evenly".
- mc32 4mo agoWhat would keep people from circumventing a roboticized society and forming their own human-based society? Buy good and services produced by other people and avoid and or penalize members who cheat -ostracize them. There can be parallel systems. Pretty much only communist systems prevent non-communist systems from operating. In capitalist systems communist systems that form from time to time fail because members grow disillusioned with the inevitable slackers and because they operate within a greater society can't just send slackers to gulags or re-educational camps.
- oh_my_goodness 4mo agoWithout jobs, and after our savings run out, we will be homeless people. Then, after that, we can try to bargain for ... whatever homeless people get in this society. It doesn't look like much to me. Call it 'basic income' if that helps.
- rogerrogerr 4mo agoIf I’m one of the six people who ends up with all the money and controlling all the robots, why do I want your 3 bed 2 bath house in Tennessee? Trying to take it from you will only make you riot. It’s not exactly a bright outlook, but I do think we in the west are likely to be not-worse, on average, than we are now. Of course, your average HN denizen is much better off than average. I think there’s room for our standard of living to fall precipitously.
- whatever1 4mo agoYou will need electricity, water you will be producing waste etc. in your Tennessee house. Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you? Really I don’t see any playable alternative other than near complete annihilation of human race. It’s very similar to a nuclear apocalypse. Very few get to survive.
- qsera 4mo ago>Why would someone who owns all of the power and resources share with you? Ideally governments will see to it. This also assumes that governments have a much larger army of robots than any private individual. Just like how governments makes it illegal to own firearms, it will be illegal to own certain class of robots with combat capability.. Thus governments (the people really/ideally) will see to it that everyone will be comfortable with minimum amount of work utilizing the robots. One can dream!
- vinyl7 4mo agoWith the way things are now, the corporations own the government. The 'government' is not some sort of impartial mediator that people have been lead to believe it is
- jameslk 4mo ago> Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world. Where do these few acquire all their wealth? What happens when these remaining few need to compete?
- whatever1 4mo agoIn the only way that matters. They will corner finite resources and land. Now if we are lucky and the owners are humans with a good heart (and not AI), maybe there is some room for some people (aka provide authentic experiences)
- jameslk 4mo ago> They will corner finite resources and land. They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume? Investors don’t usually like to invest in companies that aren’t going to eventually earn any revenue either
- strken 4mo agoMoney is a mirage. You can't use dollars to hold land; you need force projection. Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them. You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase with no injection of money at all.
- jameslk 4mo agoWe can’t magically skip steps. It’s like South Park’s underwear gnomes. We’re missing steps in between and hand waving them away
- strken 4mo agoThe first comment said "They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?" I was explaining that money is irrelevant and so are the jobless masses. Someone owns the factories, and that person is the one who is relevant here. They of course need to be convinced, by money or other means, but the jobless masses are only relevant to the extent that they own and control wealth; since they are jobless, they probably have very little ownership or control. You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
- baron816 4mo agoWhy is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized. The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.
- cousin_it 4mo agoI think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.
- crabmusket 4mo agoA data centre the size of Gormenghast, with the remains of humanity clinging like limpets to the outer walls, trying to stay warm. </doomer>
- carlob 4mo ago> trying to stay cool FTFY
- baq 4mo agoThe technical term is ‘mirror life’.
- bigbadfeline 4mo ago> It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
- BobbyTables2 4mo agoIronically, if 1 person had 99.99% of all the wealth in the world, I’m not entirely sure it would have as much meaning as one might assume. The one with the wealth would be effectively be unable to obtain greater wealth, power, or influence. Other this individual being able to command arbitrary amounts of goods and services, the rest would compete for the remaining scraps as we do today. Ironically, if they want technological innovation and all the fancy toys that result, then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it! Holding on to all the wealth so that nobody else can get it would be highly detrimental to a capitalistic society.
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo agoFor some people it's a zero sum game. If you have 99% of it, you won.
- foogazi 4mo ago> then it would be in their interest to give the rest something to aim for. Serfdom isn’t going to cut it They can give them drones to aim at - enjoy your serfdom, let the AI tell you how to live your best life, don’t worry and don’t step out of the walled garden
- nearbuy 4mo agoNot much point in serfdom when they don't have use for human labor.
- AngryData 4mo agoI think it is a supreme delusion that robots and turrets can defend you against any large mass of angry or hungry humans. Until you can field an robot army that supremely outnumbers humans, im betting on the larger group of clever little shit humans. And if shit gets bad enough small grenade or bomb type EMPs do work, provided you aren't relying on electronics yourself and aren't worried about pissing off everyone in 100+ miles with EM noise. And that is assuming their isn't any larger organized resistance organizations.
- pixl97 4mo agoEMPs are generally much harder to make than one would expect unless you plan on setting off nukes, which generally pisses everyone off. The particular problem with organized resistance movements is the ever present monitoring of everything everywhere. This is where AI has a one up on us meat bags. When everything you do is logged and correlated the leaders of the resistance may find it hard to hide. Simply put Ukraine is but a slight taste of the future horrors of war. Once you start mass producing things like smart mines (think something like a drone with a camera and a bomb) and just tell it to 'kill humans' your EM noise doesn't even matter, it's a stand alone unit. Things like this will just sit around a few day and catch you moving and then blow up on you.
- AngryData 4mo agoI mean explosively pumped generators aren't new and were invented in the 50s. The hardest part is getting a fast enough explosive, however it doesn't take that much effort or chemistry knowledge to make supersonic explosives if someone needed it. And neodynium magnets are pretty common consumer products these day. It is harder that just blowing stuff up, but when one side is using killer robots and other advanced electronics tech it doesn't seem like much effort in comparison. We already see criminal elements making guns and drugs and narco submarines, a fast explosive and magnets doesn't seem beyond reach to me.
- hurtigioll 4mo agoit's much cheaper to defend against EMP (Faraday shield) than to make EMPs the fact that EMP blasts are not used in Ukraine, by both sides, to defend against drones also shows its not such a good idea
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo agoDoes wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried. Also, since markets are fundamentally neural networks (with prices as action potentials) it seems like an improved understanding of how to manipulate neural networks would coincide with a change in how we practice markets. I suspect it'll come down to whether they can use markets to dispense with us faster than we can dispense with the use of markets amongst ourselves. Neither is an outcome that has much precedent because both would've seemed impossible pre-AI.
- e40 4mo agoOf course it does. It’s still a measurement though against other super rich.
- pmontra 4mo agoWealth is not a goal, it shouldn't be. Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power, not necessarily with money. So yes, it will always matter especially to people that like to have power over other people.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago> Wealth is a mean to be able to do whatever one desires to do. You can measure it with power. I think you have these swapped. It's the utility of wealth as a measurement of power that breaks down when one person has all the money and others have none.
- verisimi 4mo agoMonetary wealth is a proxy for power. > Does wealth continue to be a coherent concept once very few have all of it? I don't think it's been tried. I think this is already the case.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]