5 ms·

> 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

> 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.

qsera 4mo ago
>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.. How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea? >Who owns the robots though.. I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.
- ares623 4mo ago
  > How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea? If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free? > I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less. Taxes from what?
  - casey2 4mo ago
    For all the other economic activities that robots don't run? 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it. As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
    - fakedang 4mo ago
      > 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. X for doubt. When automation entered agriculture, we started producing way more for way less. Agriculture stopped becoming a significant part for most developed economies in terms of both GDP contribution and employment. > All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it. X. The people who lose jobs rarely find something anew - they'll simply become part of an expanding labour pool, further depressing wages. All while some numpty politician would be telling them they need to stop farming and start learning how to code (never mind there's absolutely no point in doing that either). > As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought. A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.
  - qsera 4mo ago
    >If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free? As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that. >Taxes from what.. Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.
    - shimman 4mo ago
- crabmusket 4mo ago
  > Isn't that the idea? No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%: > corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource. The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else? I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production. Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world. But that's still not "abundance for all".
- stephc_int13 4mo ago
  It is never really “for free”. It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work. They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc. No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.
  - danaris 4mo ago
    Energy has become nearly free, though, as the space- and cost-efficiency of solar skyrockets. That's really not the problem here.
  - qsera 4mo ago
    >They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc. But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
    - stephc_int13 4mo ago
      Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.
      - qsera 4mo ago
        By free, I mean "free of human effort"
        stephc_int13 4mo ago
        If you own a factory, what you see is a big box with input and output, human labor is just an annoying variable, removing it won't turn the entire thing "free". The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.
        qsera 4mo ago
        I am thinking of a case where governments will own the robots. People will pay some minimal tax to pay for the maintenance of the robots. If other robots can be made to do it, then even that cost is saved. Government will, among other things, oversee that the needs of the people are well served by these robots.
- mordae 4mo ago
  > I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less. Governments are no longer allowed to print money. Do you think they will be allowed to build unlimited supply of robots? You are funny. All the robot factories will belong to rich and we will have to _beg_ to have some measly allocation _while_ we feed the police that prevents us from just taking them. And politicians will mostly just say this is _inevitable_ for some reason or other.
  - qsera 4mo ago
    But then why hasn't governments and the rich already collaborated converted all of us plebs into slaves? If that has not happened already then why do you think so pessimistically?
- mjanx123 4mo ago
  > The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less. Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population. At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done. At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison. The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you. Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison Population: how did you say we can get them? A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots. Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.
markdown 4mo ago
The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.
imtringued 4mo ago
>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. If you permit me to reference the blog post: >It is a well attested fact that human logic is far from flawless. We are all victims of our biases, emotions, and equally importantly, our implicit assumptions. Just like in mathematics, where all our theorems stem from sets of axioms, so do our beliefs stem from assumptions. But unlike in mathematics, where the axioms are concrete, explicit, and shaped by natural observations, the human logic's axioms are more abstract, implicit, and shaped by our knowledge and our cultural background. You're making an implicit assumption that all land is owned by people who want to deprive you of the land and its products. You can't make the argument that a "rich person" is holding onto the land and eating all of the food produced by it, so it would be unfair for the "rich person" to give you access to the food. The underlying problem here is access to land and this is an independent concern from "The Economy". >Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those. Ok so you mentioned it, but this means we are no longer talking about the machines. In fact the presence or absence of machines is a completely irrelevant factor here. If you can get your hands on the machines, it turns into a non issue. And as mentioned above, if you are exclusively producing for yourself, you don't need that much land, hence the people without land are in the right if they demand to get some of it. The very argument you made is that the people with the machines are better stewards of the land, but this logic only makes sense in the presence of them producing for an outside consumer. If they just hold onto the land and do nothing with it, their hypothetical productivity increase is worth nothing compared to the very real zero yield they produce by doing nothing. Even an inefficient production process has higher absolute productivity than doing nothing. Take it one step further. From the perspective of the low productivity producers the land is very valuable and from the perspective of the high productivity autark producer, the land is worth very little. If the autark producer wants to role play a feudalist and puts an army of killer robots there, he would be expending a lot of resources for something that the producer doesn't consider valuable. Since the low productivity producers consider the land more valuable, their military budget per acre is actually higher. So now the second underlying assumption is that the landless people are defeated by the robot army of the landed people. I hope you see where this is going. It's not about economics at this point anymore. It's some weird power fantasy where some group of people always wins and another group of people always loses.

qsera 4mo ago

>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.. How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea? >Who owns the robots though.. I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

ares623 4mo ago
> How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea? If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free? > I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less. Taxes from what?
- casey2 4mo ago
  For all the other economic activities that robots don't run? 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it. As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.
  - fakedang 4mo ago
    > 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. X for doubt. When automation entered agriculture, we started producing way more for way less. Agriculture stopped becoming a significant part for most developed economies in terms of both GDP contribution and employment. > All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it. X. The people who lose jobs rarely find something anew - they'll simply become part of an expanding labour pool, further depressing wages. All while some numpty politician would be telling them they need to stop farming and start learning how to code (never mind there's absolutely no point in doing that either). > As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought. A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.
- qsera 4mo ago
  >If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free? As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that. >Taxes from what.. Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.
  - shimman 4mo ago
crabmusket 4mo ago
> Isn't that the idea? No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%: > corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource. The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else? I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production. Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world. But that's still not "abundance for all".
stephc_int13 4mo ago
It is never really “for free”. It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work. They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc. No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.
- danaris 4mo ago
  Energy has become nearly free, though, as the space- and cost-efficiency of solar skyrockets. That's really not the problem here.
- qsera 4mo ago
  >They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc. But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..
  - stephc_int13 4mo ago
    Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.
    - qsera 4mo ago
      By free, I mean "free of human effort"
      - stephc_int13 4mo ago
        If you own a factory, what you see is a big box with input and output, human labor is just an annoying variable, removing it won't turn the entire thing "free". The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.
        qsera 4mo ago
        I am thinking of a case where governments will own the robots. People will pay some minimal tax to pay for the maintenance of the robots. If other robots can be made to do it, then even that cost is saved. Government will, among other things, oversee that the needs of the people are well served by these robots.
mordae 4mo ago
> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less. Governments are no longer allowed to print money. Do you think they will be allowed to build unlimited supply of robots? You are funny. All the robot factories will belong to rich and we will have to _beg_ to have some measly allocation _while_ we feed the police that prevents us from just taking them. And politicians will mostly just say this is _inevitable_ for some reason or other.
- qsera 4mo ago
  But then why hasn't governments and the rich already collaborated converted all of us plebs into slaves? If that has not happened already then why do you think so pessimistically?
mjanx123 4mo ago
> The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less. Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population. At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done. At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison. The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you. Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison Population: how did you say we can get them? A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots. Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.

markdown 4mo ago

The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.

imtringued 4mo ago

>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. If you permit me to reference the blog post: >It is a well attested fact that human logic is far from flawless. We are all victims of our biases, emotions, and equally importantly, our implicit assumptions. Just like in mathematics, where all our theorems stem from sets of axioms, so do our beliefs stem from assumptions. But unlike in mathematics, where the axioms are concrete, explicit, and shaped by natural observations, the human logic's axioms are more abstract, implicit, and shaped by our knowledge and our cultural background. You're making an implicit assumption that all land is owned by people who want to deprive you of the land and its products. You can't make the argument that a "rich person" is holding onto the land and eating all of the food produced by it, so it would be unfair for the "rich person" to give you access to the food. The underlying problem here is access to land and this is an independent concern from "The Economy". >Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those. Ok so you mentioned it, but this means we are no longer talking about the machines. In fact the presence or absence of machines is a completely irrelevant factor here. If you can get your hands on the machines, it turns into a non issue. And as mentioned above, if you are exclusively producing for yourself, you don't need that much land, hence the people without land are in the right if they demand to get some of it. The very argument you made is that the people with the machines are better stewards of the land, but this logic only makes sense in the presence of them producing for an outside consumer. If they just hold onto the land and do nothing with it, their hypothetical productivity increase is worth nothing compared to the very real zero yield they produce by doing nothing. Even an inefficient production process has higher absolute productivity than doing nothing. Take it one step further. From the perspective of the low productivity producers the land is very valuable and from the perspective of the high productivity autark producer, the land is worth very little. If the autark producer wants to role play a feudalist and puts an army of killer robots there, he would be expending a lot of resources for something that the producer doesn't consider valuable. Since the low productivity producers consider the land more valuable, their military budget per acre is actually higher. So now the second underlying assumption is that the landless people are defeated by the robot army of the landed people. I hope you see where this is going. It's not about economics at this point anymore. It's some weird power fantasy where some group of people always wins and another group of people always loses.