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But what's the point of real assets if you can't do anything with them? No point in holding real estate if nobody can afford to rent/buy your houses or go do wh

But what's the point of real assets if you can't do anything with them? No point in holding real estate if nobody can afford to rent/buy your houses or go do whatever money-spending thing you put on your commercial lots.

ArcHound 25d ago
That sounds like a Q4 problem.
jdw64 25d ago
The tenants might change in the future. Right now they are individuals, but perhaps properties will be leased to build power grids or autonomous logistics warehouses. Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI, I think most of that money will just end up going toward essential housing costs anyway. In fact, if you look at recent trends in real estate, commercial properties are where the big money is being made, aren't they?
- mcmcmc 25d ago
  > Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI This always makes me laugh. What motivation would the oligarchs have to pay out UBI? If they can automate the labor who needs more mouths to feed? They’ll push undesirables into ghettos and start a slow genocide of starvation and disease.
  - jdw64 25d ago
    Is it because UBI is cheaper than a massacre? Since it will all end up being absorbed by the capitalists anyway.
    - mitxela 25d ago
      Every bit of money that circulates is absorbed by every part of the economy. For instance, 100% of money is used to buy cheese and flows to sellers of cheese.
  - jdw64 25d ago
    Because, think about it. Let's assume techno-feudalism is complete. Every piece of infrastructure is going to have usage fees attached anyway. Everyone is using AI, so are you going to be the only one not using it? Of course you'll use it. It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre? From a cost-benefit perspective, I think it's a terrible idea. In the case of a massacre, long-term instability makes it hard to build a supportive faction. But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run. There are already plenty of people who blindly defend corporations even when they do terrible things, right? In my opinion, UBI is simply the cheaper option. Historically speaking, post-massacre recovery has always ended up costing much more.
    - asdff 25d ago
      >It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre? Isn't it obvious? Your existence is margin that they leave on the table. And for what reason if you have no real skills or anything to offer? You are a leech. You exist to consume. You create nothing in this new future. You have no value. You aren't even an asset. You are a liability. And what you think they will fear instability that we will bring upon? We will be armed with sharpened sticks and a smattering of ar15s at best case, while we are targeted from orbit by automated precision ordinance. Imagine a war between two AI controlled nation states. One has to manage a population during this war, the other opted to cull its population early in the war and maximize all its resources into the war effort. Guess who wins that war every time and likely takes control of the planet.
    - meindnoch 25d ago
      >But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run. Automatic gun turrets are even cheaper in the long run.
  - hackthemack 25d ago
    Me too. Here is some history to back up how absurd the statement is. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay title "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" He predicted that in 2030, technology, productivity, capitalism would solve the economy. There would be so little work to do and so many resources that the average work week could just be 15 hours! He wrote that once all us plebes were liberated from work, what we would face is humanities greatest problem. What purpose will we have with all this new found leisure time! We only have to wait 4 more years to relax.
    - jdw64 25d ago
      I see things differently. This is a change unlike anything in the past. Back then, it didn't replace human intellectual activity. However, problems of increasing scale will continue to arise, and inevitably, issues will emerge that are too difficult to solve through the efforts of human communities alone. The performance gap between free and paid AI models is massive. The resulting divide between children from low-income and high-income families is quite evident based on my observations in my country. It will only get harder to keep up. I don't support UBI either. The fact that UBI is even being discussed means the market is broken. The problem is that in the current market, prices for freelance work tied to intellectual labor have been absolutely crushed by AI. Looking at indicators from Booth or the Korean freelance market, "middle-tier" jobs are disappearing. While currently established professionals remain unaffected for now, the volume of work has drastically decreased for developers or writers who are still building their reputations. There are statistics from Japan showing this as well. My workload has also decreased to a ridiculous extent. The so-called barbell structure is becoming entrenched. The core issue is this: if that happens, how will society handle the dissatisfaction of such a massive number of people? If more than half the population are workers, there is no problem, but if more than half are unemployed, that is a serious issue. Income polarization is continuing to accelerate. Because there are no aristocrats without slaves, capitalists need workers to elevate themselves. Wealth and power are strictly relative, and they need miserable ornaments to make themselves feel like "awe-inspiring beings." To confirm their own sense of superiority, capitalists require human spectators who look up to them while suffering in misery. Why else did ancient Rome unleash lions and gladiators in the Colosseum? Later on, things made by humans will become expensive luxuries, while commoners like me will be fed UBI—the bare minimum bread for survival—along with cheap, AIslop. If making money by learning a skill increasingly requires a longer time investment, you have to endure the period it takes to learn that skill and build a reputation, which is incredibly difficult for the average working class. It requires the financial backing of a wealthy family to afford a college degree, travel to academic conferences, and survive on low wages. And if someone can endure all that to build a reputation, it will naturally lead to a massive concentration of wealth at the very top.
  - mitxela 25d ago
    Historically, such things have been brought about by extreme political violence, brought about by poverty. For instance, worker's rights (any at all, e.g. the right to go home every day) were a compromise between workers owning the workplaces (what workers demanded) and workers shooting their bosses to death every few weeks in frustration (what was actually happening at the time).
    - reasonableklout 25d ago
      Interesting, do you have examples of the latter? The industrial revolution feels like an imperfect analogy because industrial automation still required human labor to operate the machines. The premise of this paper is a regime where machines could also operate the machines.
      - mitxela 25d ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_revolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_revolt
    - Timon3 25d ago
      Unfortunately labor revolts will no longer be possible once warfare is sufficiently automated.
  - zx8080 25d ago
    > into ghettos No. Send to fight a war. To capture resources.
- outside1234 25d ago
  Who is going to pay for UBI?
  - smallmancontrov 25d ago
    Taxing capital? Impossible! Obscene! Everyone knows that only labor can/should be taxed.
    - johnnyanmac 25d ago
      We've done such a good job the past decades of taxing capital before. Surely when corporations wield all the leverage they will finally get theirs.
meindnoch 25d ago
Robots will use real estate as rain shelter after the human occupants have starved to death.
mitxela 25d ago
It's speculation and high scores. Rich people trade houses to each other and see who has the most houses. It doesn't matter if the roof caved in, except insofar as that makes the house less impressive to the rich next to you.
est31 25d ago
The plutonomy transition is well under way. The sardinian seafront villa will likely retain and gain value as the early anthropic employee might like it, while the house in some flyover state might not find any buyers. The economy of the future will be about yachts, supercars, hermes bags, private air travel and ozempic. Not about how you made it possible for everyone to watch a gigantic library of videos for free, or how you made cars affordable for everyone.
throw234234234 25d ago
Real assets have utility of their own (i.e. a house to live in, commodity to build, etc). Money only exists to incentivize human economic actors to bother working, to relative price resources against each other and for governments to use as a tool - it isn't wealth on the aggregate scale. AI invalidates a lot of the need for money to even exist as a concept anyway in some scenarios. If only a few people have all the stuff (huge inequality) you don't really need a large money system because you no longer need most people to get what you want (i.e. most are economically irrelevant). You have a magical genie called AI instead that can transform what you have into what you want as long as you have the raw materials, space and energy. The wealthy could then negotiate in large transactions via barter - I trade that plot of land for that copper mine. Most large transactions are negotiated in any case. A very likely case (there are others) is that AI enables feudalism of some sort to come back - where the new lords are the owners of the other economic factors of production that remain scarce (capital, land, resources, social) - not intelligence and/or labor. This is the opposite of a meritocratic society. It would explain why people want to win the AI race; and are willing to burn uneconomic amounts of money to build it out. There is a race to the finish here.

ArcHound 25d ago

That sounds like a Q4 problem.

jdw64 25d ago

The tenants might change in the future. Right now they are individuals, but perhaps properties will be leased to build power grids or autonomous logistics warehouses. Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI, I think most of that money will just end up going toward essential housing costs anyway. In fact, if you look at recent trends in real estate, commercial properties are where the big money is being made, aren't they?

mcmcmc 25d ago
> Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI This always makes me laugh. What motivation would the oligarchs have to pay out UBI? If they can automate the labor who needs more mouths to feed? They’ll push undesirables into ghettos and start a slow genocide of starvation and disease.
- jdw64 25d ago
  Is it because UBI is cheaper than a massacre? Since it will all end up being absorbed by the capitalists anyway.
  - mitxela 25d ago
    Every bit of money that circulates is absorbed by every part of the economy. For instance, 100% of money is used to buy cheese and flows to sellers of cheese.
- jdw64 25d ago
  Because, think about it. Let's assume techno-feudalism is complete. Every piece of infrastructure is going to have usage fees attached anyway. Everyone is using AI, so are you going to be the only one not using it? Of course you'll use it. It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre? From a cost-benefit perspective, I think it's a terrible idea. In the case of a massacre, long-term instability makes it hard to build a supportive faction. But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run. There are already plenty of people who blindly defend corporations even when they do terrible things, right? In my opinion, UBI is simply the cheaper option. Historically speaking, post-massacre recovery has always ended up costing much more.
  - asdff 25d ago
    >It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre? Isn't it obvious? Your existence is margin that they leave on the table. And for what reason if you have no real skills or anything to offer? You are a leech. You exist to consume. You create nothing in this new future. You have no value. You aren't even an asset. You are a liability. And what you think they will fear instability that we will bring upon? We will be armed with sharpened sticks and a smattering of ar15s at best case, while we are targeted from orbit by automated precision ordinance. Imagine a war between two AI controlled nation states. One has to manage a population during this war, the other opted to cull its population early in the war and maximize all its resources into the war effort. Guess who wins that war every time and likely takes control of the planet.
  - meindnoch 25d ago
    >But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run. Automatic gun turrets are even cheaper in the long run.
- hackthemack 25d ago
  Me too. Here is some history to back up how absurd the statement is. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay title "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" He predicted that in 2030, technology, productivity, capitalism would solve the economy. There would be so little work to do and so many resources that the average work week could just be 15 hours! He wrote that once all us plebes were liberated from work, what we would face is humanities greatest problem. What purpose will we have with all this new found leisure time! We only have to wait 4 more years to relax.
  - jdw64 25d ago
    I see things differently. This is a change unlike anything in the past. Back then, it didn't replace human intellectual activity. However, problems of increasing scale will continue to arise, and inevitably, issues will emerge that are too difficult to solve through the efforts of human communities alone. The performance gap between free and paid AI models is massive. The resulting divide between children from low-income and high-income families is quite evident based on my observations in my country. It will only get harder to keep up. I don't support UBI either. The fact that UBI is even being discussed means the market is broken. The problem is that in the current market, prices for freelance work tied to intellectual labor have been absolutely crushed by AI. Looking at indicators from Booth or the Korean freelance market, "middle-tier" jobs are disappearing. While currently established professionals remain unaffected for now, the volume of work has drastically decreased for developers or writers who are still building their reputations. There are statistics from Japan showing this as well. My workload has also decreased to a ridiculous extent. The so-called barbell structure is becoming entrenched. The core issue is this: if that happens, how will society handle the dissatisfaction of such a massive number of people? If more than half the population are workers, there is no problem, but if more than half are unemployed, that is a serious issue. Income polarization is continuing to accelerate. Because there are no aristocrats without slaves, capitalists need workers to elevate themselves. Wealth and power are strictly relative, and they need miserable ornaments to make themselves feel like "awe-inspiring beings." To confirm their own sense of superiority, capitalists require human spectators who look up to them while suffering in misery. Why else did ancient Rome unleash lions and gladiators in the Colosseum? Later on, things made by humans will become expensive luxuries, while commoners like me will be fed UBI—the bare minimum bread for survival—along with cheap, AIslop. If making money by learning a skill increasingly requires a longer time investment, you have to endure the period it takes to learn that skill and build a reputation, which is incredibly difficult for the average working class. It requires the financial backing of a wealthy family to afford a college degree, travel to academic conferences, and survive on low wages. And if someone can endure all that to build a reputation, it will naturally lead to a massive concentration of wealth at the very top.
- mitxela 25d ago
  Historically, such things have been brought about by extreme political violence, brought about by poverty. For instance, worker's rights (any at all, e.g. the right to go home every day) were a compromise between workers owning the workplaces (what workers demanded) and workers shooting their bosses to death every few weeks in frustration (what was actually happening at the time).
  - reasonableklout 25d ago
    Interesting, do you have examples of the latter? The industrial revolution feels like an imperfect analogy because industrial automation still required human labor to operate the machines. The premise of this paper is a regime where machines could also operate the machines.
    - mitxela 25d ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_revolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_revolt
  - Timon3 25d ago
    Unfortunately labor revolts will no longer be possible once warfare is sufficiently automated.
- zx8080 25d ago
  > into ghettos No. Send to fight a war. To capture resources.
outside1234 25d ago
Who is going to pay for UBI?
- smallmancontrov 25d ago
  Taxing capital? Impossible! Obscene! Everyone knows that only labor can/should be taxed.
  - johnnyanmac 25d ago
    We've done such a good job the past decades of taxing capital before. Surely when corporations wield all the leverage they will finally get theirs.

meindnoch 25d ago

Robots will use real estate as rain shelter after the human occupants have starved to death.

mitxela 25d ago

It's speculation and high scores. Rich people trade houses to each other and see who has the most houses. It doesn't matter if the roof caved in, except insofar as that makes the house less impressive to the rich next to you.

est31 25d ago

The plutonomy transition is well under way. The sardinian seafront villa will likely retain and gain value as the early anthropic employee might like it, while the house in some flyover state might not find any buyers. The economy of the future will be about yachts, supercars, hermes bags, private air travel and ozempic. Not about how you made it possible for everyone to watch a gigantic library of videos for free, or how you made cars affordable for everyone.

throw234234234 25d ago

Real assets have utility of their own (i.e. a house to live in, commodity to build, etc). Money only exists to incentivize human economic actors to bother working, to relative price resources against each other and for governments to use as a tool - it isn't wealth on the aggregate scale. AI invalidates a lot of the need for money to even exist as a concept anyway in some scenarios. If only a few people have all the stuff (huge inequality) you don't really need a large money system because you no longer need most people to get what you want (i.e. most are economically irrelevant). You have a magical genie called AI instead that can transform what you have into what you want as long as you have the raw materials, space and energy. The wealthy could then negotiate in large transactions via barter - I trade that plot of land for that copper mine. Most large transactions are negotiated in any case. A very likely case (there are others) is that AI enables feudalism of some sort to come back - where the new lords are the owners of the other economic factors of production that remain scarce (capital, land, resources, social) - not intelligence and/or labor. This is the opposite of a meritocratic society. It would explain why people want to win the AI race; and are willing to burn uneconomic amounts of money to build it out. There is a race to the finish here.