[marcosdumay]

It's a great question. Without any good answer, just needs some better context.

You see, capitalism is a paperclip maximizer but has no builtin paperclip model to produce. It is still made of people, and gets it's goal from those people all the time. If there's no goal given, it simply fails (economists call the milder versions of that failure mode by "deflationary depression").

Also, unemployed people are not completely powerless against capital. At least not now. Even if the people are completely outcompeted, even if the powerful few have an army of robot actuators, people are still resourceful and not powerless. The really scary scenarios are those where the powerful few owns an army of superhuman brains.

[pygy_]

The human bits are being gradually replaced. First strength, then dexterity, now smarts.

We are still, to some extent driving the demand side of the equation with our various needs (see Maslow's hierarchy), but it looks like finance has become mostly independent, for example.

The "rising tide that lifts all boats" is nice for people rich enough to buy a boat, and with the growing rift between economy and the medium income since 2008, it looks like many will be left to drown while the water rises.

[marcosdumay]

> but it looks like finance has become mostly independent

It's not. The fact that when we take a little bit of human demand away, everything falls apart is evidence of that.

Governments are a kind of AI that demands stuff by itself. We've been good at keeping it at check up to now. I'm not concerned about anything else being a more effective consumer until we get into superhuman AI, as desiring stuff is not something we engineer very well.

I agree much more with your concerns about wealth distribution. Automation's endgame is pushing the price of everything into zero, and the salary of everybody also into zero. Buying power on that scenario is too loosely defined to let anybody stay calm.

[pygy_]

Couldn't industrial corporations become demand drivers?

[marcosdumay]

They could. But why would they?

Why would corporations decide to buy stuff for their own sake? That's a loss of what they are built to maximize, that is money.