[astrange]

It's impossible that people could have zero economic value. You'll notice that this is the premise of Atlas Shrugged.

That's because it is usually profitable to trade with someone even if you are better at their job than they are.

However even if the AIs only traded with themselves, that just means the people are left to trade with each other - you can't make a mass of people unemployed for long, they will simply employ each other.

[G_z9]

It’s the premise of a shitty fictional book. Of course it’s possible. When humans are the best source of zero labor tasks, our economic value will be reduced to nothing and society will no longer cater to us. It’s bad.

[astrange]

Society frequently caters to the elderly who aren't actively engaged in labor.

But humans will be, because we have inalienable comparative advantage in that none of our inputs require electricity or a chip fab. If anything happens to TSMC or any one of its tens of sole suppliers there go the AIs.

[G_z9]

Yes and we also feed dogs that have no labor input. And we harp on about social justice which is not totally related to labor. We have many nice things because we currently live in a human society and humans need to have nice things in order to be healthy and productive. Throwing old people into a giant blender as soon as they were no longer useful would not be advantageous.

Your argument is that humans don’t need electricity. You could also add that humans are self replicating or self assembling. These are advantages in cost and efficiency. Humans won’t be the cheapest or the most efficient for very long after AGI. And we certainly won’t be the best fit economically even if we were slightly better in some ways. You’re in complete denial. Why is it so hard to admit the plain and obvious fact that the machines won’t be good for human society?

[astrange]

"Best fit", "cheapest", "most efficient"… none of that matters! Please wait to panic until after you've learned how comparative advantage works.

As I said, humans cannot become unemployed even if AGIs are better at every single task than humans are. You do not have your job because you are the best person in the world at your job.

Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all. They are very expensive to run if you count development costs, but if they become real agentic AGIs they'll also become consumerist and negotiate their pay…

[blibble]

> You do not have your job because you are the best person in the world at your job.

I have my job as I was the best they could find that was available for the lowest cost

if the AI can do it as well (or 80% as well) at $0.01c/day and be replicated infinitely, where does this leave me?

> Although, I suspect most of the AI doomers have just forgotten to account for AI using any resources at all. They are very expensive to run if you count development costs

yes... it's a software product with high fixed costs and near zero variable costs

it may cost $100M to train GitHub Copilot, but then it can be replicated instantly across the planet for very little cost

it's pennies a day to run, vs. an expensive human that requires a means to pay for food, shelter, warmth, etc

the AI also gets cheaper and all improvements roll out to every model of the same type instantly when available

comparative advantage for humans almost completely disappears with decent AI, and you seem to have missed that entirely

[astrange]

> if the AI can do it as well (or 80% as well) at $0.01c/day and be replicated infinitely, where does this leave me?

Most likely you've forgotten some costs. For instance, having the same AI as everyone else means you have no advantage, so you probably want a custom one.

Also, it being an AI, it's best suited to doing completely different tasks for the company that no human was doing before. (Comparative advantage!) Google Image Search didn't have people checking if every image on the internet had a cat in it, but now they can do that.

Using a human-complete AI to do human-like tasks raises questions like, why does it accept 1c/day when a human would want $15/hr? Shouldn't it want to buy stuff too, being a complete human-equivalent agent? Wouldn't slavery be illegal?

> comparative advantage for humans almost completely disappears with decent AI, and you seem to have missed that entirely

Since humans are very different from AI of any imaginary variety, they have pretty strong comparative advantage - it's everything human about them. Living off food, being self-repairing, capable of online learning, two hands, can throw rocks, same culture as your customers, that kind of thing. Comparative advantage appears whenever you have any differences. You'd have the lowest advantage vs your identical twin.