[tivert]

> what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.

Well, AI has the promise to provide a supply of loyal slaves to anyone who can afford to pay for the electricity and compute. It's a capitalist's dream: with AI, they may never be forced by necessity to share a single thing with us poors again.

[robertlagrant]

You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things. You get them because people can make money making the same product cheaper and sell it to a lot of people.

That's why all the capitalist countries are the ones where we have to keep increasing the standard of living that's counted as being in poverty. Up we go.

[tivert]

> You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things.

No. Capitalism means you need to rely on being useful to the people who own things. If you're not useful to them, they won't pay ("share with") you.

For a capitalist, employees you have to pay <<< loyal robot slaves. Once you have those slaves, I predict the economy will make an abrupt shift away from consumer goods to vanity projects.

[robertlagrant]

People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well. I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave. The only exception to this is taxes, which don't require mutually agreed exchange.

[tivert]

> People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well.

That's not super clear, but I think I get what you're saying.

My whole point is AGI breaks that idea, and frees capital from the need for labor.

> I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave.

And when an AGI can do your job better and cheaper than you, your employer fires you and stops paying you. And all the other employers don't hire you because they don't need you either. Then, if you're lucky, you get to live on the dole, otherwise you (eventually) get to be homeless have the opportunity to try scrape by at the margins (maybe you can squat and live off a garden for a few years, until a solar megaproject evicts you from now unprofitable farmland). In all cases you're marginalized and economically irrelevant.

[robertlagrant]

If no one is hired then the employers don't have anyone to buy their stuff. Employers only do well if they provide someone else a useful good or service.

What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs. In 18th century Europe almost half the population were agricultural labourers. Mechanisation reduced that drastically. That did not mean that other jobs weren't created.

[tivert]

> If no one is hired then the employers don't have anyone to buy their stuff. Employers only do well if they provide someone else a useful good or service.

You're still stuck with assumptions that are obsolete in this scenario.

In the AGI scenario, the employers that are dependent on consumer sales will wither and die, as consumer buying power shrinks due to unemployment. Eventually the economy will realign towards certain kinds of B2B sales (e.g. electrical power) and vanity projects.

> What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs. In 18th century Europe almost half the population were agricultural labourers. Mechanisation reduced that drastically. That did not mean that other jobs weren't created.

Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently). There might be a rump of exceptionally talented individuals who still could be employed like today, but that's just a tiny sliver of the population. There will also be some "entertainment" jobs, like prostitute that will remain as well, but given the vast decrease in individuals participating in the economy, the total numbers would likely be less than now.

Not everything is going to be a replay of the past. As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results."

[dylan604]

I hope that in your scenario that everyone that can afford this notion of yours receives a robot that at the minimum is as annoying as C3-P0 if not closer to a Jar Jar.

[hunter-gatherer]

That's a naive outlook. AI will do for humanity as much good as every other alleged redeeming technology has.

[dylan604]

Or worse. Personally, I think social media has been a net negative. It was done intentionally by their makers.

AI seems like it's just a victim of that, but seeing as how they have stolen all of the data they've built their tools on, then of course it's going to be no better than social media at best