[ESMirro]

Given the current emerging wealth gap and all trends in the Western world I fear you’d have to be incredibly naive to think the long term goal here is to benefit the average person.

This is simply a play by capital to reduce and remove expensive knowledge worker roles and drag them more in line with the rest of the population already struggling to get by. You won’t be a “25 year old retiree” because that’s bad for those in charge. You’ll be a “25 year old working 3 jobs just to scrape by on your rent because you’re just a warm body and we can replace you easily”.

UBI is political fantasy, the US can’t even offer proper universal healthcare - you genuinely believe they’d pursue that when the alternative is more power and an even greater reliance on capital?

[hackerlight]

There's a flaw in this analysis. You only consider the local effects of labor becoming redundant, while ignoring the larger global effects of improved efficiency and how the gains of efficiency are inevitably spread around due to competition.

Apply your analysis to the automation and scaling up of the factory and agriculture. According to your premises, such things should have been negative for the average person's material wellbeing. These sectors have become more efficient, which means less demand for labor, which means more power for capital.

But, observation (massive poverty alleviation) contradicts this conclusion, which means your premises are wrong. The premises are wrong because there are mechanisms built into both capitalism itself (competition between supply, i.e. between capital, driving down economic rents) as well as the attenuation from government (welfare state) which mean the gains from efficiency aren't all captured into the pockets of capital. They get spread around.

> naive to think the long term goal here is to benefit the average person.

The goal is always profit. Sometimes profit is aligned with what benefits the average person. Sometimes it isn't. A bad outcome doesn't necessarily follow from this.

[ESMirro]

You speak of competition, but the logical end goal here is a handful of companies in control of something that automates large quantities of the current knowledge economy in a way never yet before seen, in a capitalist society already struggling to deal with vast wealth disparity; handing unprecedented power to a handful of people who have already proven they have no regard for the common person.

I don’t agree that there is a historical precedent for the kind of situation this could put the world.

It may all be moot as I doubt the technology will advance to the level we are discussing, but in that scenario I would like you to be correct, but strongly doubt it. We shall see I guess.

[hackerlight]

> You speak of competition, but the logical end goal here is a handful of companies in control of something that automates large quantities of the current knowledge economy in a way never yet before seen, in a capitalist society already struggling to deal with vast wealth disparity; handing unprecedented power to a handful of people who have already proven they have no regard for the common person.

Right, but the outcomes aren't zero-sum. Two things have been simultaneously true in the past. Power accumulating in the hands of capital and wealth disparity increasing (true), and material conditions for the bottom improving (true). This is because there are mechanisms (both naturally within capitalism, as well as via government) that make it impossible for capital to capture all of the upside, even if they are able to capture most of it.

While I agree there is no theory or historical precedent that can predict what the world will look like when AGI arrives -- it's such a paradigm breaking event, and there are many ways we could end up in a dystopia -- I don't see a better alternative approach when it comes to forming a tentative view (specifically pertaining to material conditions).