[prottog]

> If you accept that we live in post scarcity and begin from that principle

Are you saying we currently already live in a post-scarcity world? Or are you saying that AGI will get us there, some time in the relatively near future?

[kranke155]

We already live in post scarcity, in some locations. The world has an over abundance of goods.

The industrialised world already produces more than enough for the whole world, yet not all of the world is industrialised.

Even in Brazil, a low to middle income country, obesity and diabetes is a bigger problem than hunger. And the laptops they buy are made in China same as everywhere else. Notice how Brazil has no local laptop production - that’s because Chinese production is more than enough.

That already tells you what you need to know about “scarcity”. Certainly there is no scarcity of calorie production. And there is no scarcity of laptop production. Just the concentrated production in Shenzen, done by maybe 0.1% of the population, serves large parts of the world. Brazil could have a domestic industry, but there’s no need for one.

Deconstruct the concept of unemployment. Unemployment is simply put, an over abundance of people for the number of available tasks.

An over abundance of people for the number of available tasks is an unnatural situation. Hunter gatherers couldn’t have more people than the tasks available. If you were alive you hunted.

But Industrialised society has meant that a very small proportion of the population produces all the physical goods necessary to the entire population. Hence there is unemployment and underemployment. AI will super charge this.

You could of course say “we will find something for them to do”. Well, yes, sure but you’re increasingly going into what David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs - jobs where if you ask people if they think they are making a difference in the world, they say no. The UK already something like 50% of jobs are like this. My impression is this is correct - a lot of the jobs in the Uk are indeed meaningless. My hunch is that is because they are a post scarcity society in denial.

[prottog]

If you're talking about commodities, sure. Capitalism did a fantastic job at producing those very cheaply and delivering them worldwide. This is why I as someone living in a first-world country have my pick of laptops and phones and can buy enough beans and rice to feed myself for a week with an hour's labor. Like you point out, even people in relatively poorer countries are in no danger of going hungry; you have to go pretty far down in the HDI index to find someplace where more people die of hunger than are obese.

But scarcity isn't limited to commodities. Services are still scarce. Infrastructure is still scarce. Even in the US, some people don't have access to drinkable water from the tap. I've seen roads in some cities that rival the quality of those in developing African nations, with no exaggeration. The bathroom at the restaurant I went to last week was filthy. None of this can be fixed by ChatGPT-4 or whatever. We're nowhere near "fully automated luxury gay space communism" levels of technology that would satisfy all of these needs without human sweat and toil. And based on historical evidence, I don't think that UBI, or any other form of greatly expanded wealth transfer, is going to get us there quicker.

I'm familiar with the concept of bullshit jobs, and certainly some jobs do appear to be exactly that (and most white-collar jobs probably feel that way at some point or another). But I and many others feel that Graeber's formulation is too strong. Of course most people are going to say that their job isn't making a difference in the world; everyone's a tiny cog in a giant machine. Hopefully those that don't find fulfillment in their jobs will find it in the other parts of their lives. It doesn't mean that we as a society have gotten to the point that everyone can just do what fulfills them and let the robots do the rest.

[kranke155]

I will say one thing - the idea that infrastructure is scarce seems falsifiable considering that in major European economies, and overall in the European Union, the level of infrastructure is quite high.

So yes, this might be the case in the US but only due to the unwillingness of the government in the last few decades to collect enough tax in order to fund infrastructure. The current conditions of major European economies prove that no, infrastructure is not particularly scarce if you are willing to fund it.

The US is richer than europe in many ways. It appears to me that its political structure has just decided not to do it. I can't imagine that the relatively poorer countries in Europe (Portugal, Poland) are somehow solving this problem but the US can't.