[ryandrake]

> 1. Some workers lose their jobs to automation.

> 2. The remaining ones have a weaker negotiation power, as their jobs are on the way out anyway. So companies have even more incentive to abuse them.

I wonder what the eventual end game is, when you let everything play out to its logical conclusion. Eventually, business owners will no longer need people at all. They'll own a magical fully-automated factory that maintains and repairs itself, and a magical AI box that makes optimal business decisions, and then just sit there owning these magical things and harvesting money every quarter. Humanity consists of the few who own all the boxes, living in opulent luxury, and the many who don't and barely subsist enough to buy the products.

[svara]

That's the argument for universal basic income in a nutshell.

I'm not so convinced, I think this comes from the limited mental model of thinking of the economy as a system for making widgets.

Rather, the economy is what happens when a society organizes its member's aggregated needs and desires.

Being a valued member of a community is a rather basic human need. As such, the economy will find novel ways to meet that aggregated desire, if it's not being met anymore by jobs that employ many workers today.

That's a rather unconventional view maybe, but I'm rather convinced it's the right one.

Of course, it leaves all the details open and the path to get there might be rocky.

[marcosdumay]

> As such, the economy will find novel ways to meet that aggregated desire, if it's not being met anymore by jobs that employ many workers today.

I'm sorry. You are claiming that the poor will buy job-alternatives from the market once they don't have a job to sustain themselves?

You seem to be missing a slight power imbalance.

[Teever]

If you could get your hands on a humanoid robot that was capable of repairing itself and with enough time and resources the ability to do full self replication by building up the necessary infrastructure to produce it's raw parts, what is the first thing you would do with it?

I'll tell you what I'd do with it.

I'd ask that genie for more wishes and have it start making copies.

[waynesonfire]

It'll be too expensive, you wont have access to affortable resources.

[Teever]

You expect the cost of a self replicating object to remain out of reach of the average person?

Why don't you think it would follow the same cost curve as integrated circuits?

[sangnoir]

> You expect the cost of a self replicating object to remain out of reach of the average person?

Yes. What's the cost of relocating software, or a movie, or an audio file? Very close to 0 (a few cents at most), and yet observe how much our current system prices each of those items. Capitalism, as practiced today, maximizes profits, not competition, I don't see that changing any time soon

[svara]

Not really, no.

First:

Human desire literally knows no bounds, yesterday's luxury is today's basic necessity.

If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.

Second:

The aggregated desire of billions of people is a formidable force. Whoever finds a way to satisfy it will have found a way to become incredibly wealthy.

[lesuorac]

> Human desire literally knows no bounds, yesterday's luxury is today's basic necessity.

I hear this quite often but I don't think it's true. I don't think we've quite hit the stopping point yet for consumption but I mean you give somebody 2 Yachts and they'll probably try to sell both of them and bank most of that money. Like ask yourself what'd you do with a 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B, 10B windfall? Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself (possible save it in a rainy day fund but w/e; consumption stops).

Of course you give everybody 10M right now it'll cause massive inflation as there isn't enough stuff actually being produced. However, GDP (adjusted for inflation) has been increasing so at some point we'll make more stuff than one can reasonable consume and at that point it'll probably be Wall-E world. However, we are talking about a windfall of 10M which is 151x the US GDP/Capita so assuming current rate of growth remains linear it'll take another 250 years for the Real GDP/Capita to be 10M (~1k in 1790 [1] to ~66k in 2023 => 151 / 66 ~= 2.5).

> If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.

I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create. So if energy becomes significantly cheap in the future I'd expect a lot of new goods to be cheaper than today's goods (which also makes it easier for everybody's consumption to go up). Of course many goods are sold by few suppliers and monopoly pricing reflects the value perceived by the consumer so there's a giant wrench.

[1]: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php

[svara]

> Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself

Only for a limited definition of "spending on myself". Self actualization is where desire truly is boundless. 10B is not a lot of money if your goal in life is now to end malaria or build a city on Mars.

Another issue with your thought experiment is that you're now relatively rich. If in some distant future you have the purchasing power of a billionaire of today without being relatively rich, many people will be looking for new ways of outdoing each other.

Of course, consuming zero cost goods is not a measure of wealth, so they'll be consuming whatever isn't zero cost then.

> I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create.

I don't. The price of physical energy fluctuates with how difficult it is for humans to tap it.

I prefer the mental model that the price reflects the human difficulty - perseverance, pain, time, intelligence, physical force, ... - required to provide something.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

You naively ignore the power of mentally ill people in our society. The social contract should be continuously improved to weaker their power and marginalize their obsessions but the corporate workplace is a rotting carcass for these dysfunctionally productive people to twist to their ends. They fight losses to their power over others more than anything else. It’s terrifying to watch the banality and casualness that people engage in these antisocial behaviors with.

[ruined]

the economy is a mode of organizing aggregated needs and desires, but it has never been total, and it is only capable of accounting for needs and desires that can be expressed financially.

the past couple centuries have seen a great advancement in application of the economic mode to greater areas of life. there are both clear and nominal benefits and downsides. its advance doesn't necessarily mean it's satisfying equivalent needs and desires, nor that it is more effective or objectively preferable.

it's well-documented that often it has advanced by threats, dispossession, and violence. and it's certainly possible that could continue, or that it might lose ground on some externality, or sustain hegemony by those same tools.

[its_ethan]

I think there's something very true about your idea here.

I don't know that there's really any study or data that would back it up, but if a large amount of people don't have the structure and expectations that employment provides, things would deteriorate quickly.

Obviously there's a spectrum here, and mindless jobs that pay as little as legally allowed aren't exactly providing fulfillment that people need. In any individual case, of course it makes sense to say "why should I/they have to do this? they should be able to chase passions or find other opportunity" but when you talk about that being "granted" to large chunks of the population (happening at essentially the same time).. I don't see it working out super well in the short or long term.

[throwway120385]

It's also a pretty strong argument that the means of production should be taken from the upper class and shared when and if we get to the point where production is limitless.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> Rather, the economy is what happens when a society organizes its member's aggregated needs and desires.

I like that definition.

[petra]

Many jobs don't really offer being valued to those working them.

[galdosdi]

Not even. Humanity would consist of a small elite who owns everything, a small, continually shrinking middle class that consists of the remaining few workers who are actually needed for some reason (eventually, this tiny middle class would shrink to just the members of boards of directors, or something -- someone has to supervise the machines even if it's just rubber stamping them) and a vast underclass experiencing a life similar to an urban homeless today or a hunter gathering tribe in the amazon or something, existing in the margins, trying to steal, beg, scam a bit here and there to survive another day in whatever weird insect-like social niches are left to be found, that are just too marginal for the elite to even care about, even with their optimal AI.

Look at life in Gaza or on the streets of Kensington today, and that is the sort of destiny we are bound for -- if fully replacing all humans really ever happens -- to become totally disposable people, who only continue to survive because someone has found it too much hassle to get around to getting rid of you at least just yet.

But that's an endgame state, it's not a path for getting there, thank goodness. I believe it would not be so simple. It would happen gradually, and it would engender resistance, eventually violent resistance once people have little to lose.

Power grows out of the barrel of a gun after all.

Now, OTOH, if at that point, robot/AI weapons are sufficient so you only need 10 people to run the entire US Army.... then it's game over.

But can you even get to that state without provoking a war before you get there? AI is extremely vulnerable in war because of its reliance on datacenters and fabs, which are fantastic military targets in wartime. So easy and quick to sabotage and so expensive and slow to build.

[SI_Rob]

I dread that we are going to see a _lot_ of of cults appear, and a disturbing concentration of political power around cult leadership as a social modality. With a large overlap with the despair-distraction-escapism industry as entertainers become increasingly valorized into spiritual and thought leaders, and eventually leaders, full stop.

They will, as did monarchs in feudal times, draw their power base from the multitude of disenfranchised commoners seeking guidance, respite from the bleak outlook for those with little or no prospect of upward mobility, and a rallying point from which to focus any semblance of pushback against the landed baronial classes. But they will all the while be paying a hefty tax to those who maintain the broadcast infrastructure that enables them to marshall and monetize their followers, so even these kings and queens will need to stay in the graces of some potentate or other.

[throwway120385]

I would argue that we already are seeing cults appear and concentrate political power.

[kriops]

Utterly absurd premise that doesn't even make sense as a dystopian thought experiment.

1. Supply drives demand. If nobody produces anything with which to buy the factory output, then the factories will not be valuable.

2. If most people are somehow living "outside" the economy, then they would form their own economy.

Those are but two trivial rebuttals, and by no means anywhere near exhaustive.

[galdosdi]

Regarding #1, owners operate a factory that sells goods to the masses so they can get the labor or products of the labor of the masses (indirectly by getting currency they then use to buy that labor)

If with enough automation that's not necessary then it doesn't matter. Why operate a sneaker factory to get the money to buy caviar from the caviar factory when you can just operate the caviar factory directly?

Put another way, china thanks to it's new middle class is a great market for a business to sell to. That's because they have something of value to trade back.

But the Congo, full of people or not, isn't. They don't have anything any capitalist could want that would equal the value of finished middle class goods. All they have to offer is cheap raw materials or perhaps labor to extract. If people are made useless, we will all be from the Congo except the legacy capital owners, who can trade with each other for everything they might want.

Regarding #2, they would form their own garbage shit economy whose size and per capital size are like specks of dust compared to the main one, with obvious consequences for power dynamics when the two economies interact. Think of the underground economy in a prison, a homeless encampment, or a warzone, or subsistence farming peasanta deep, deep in thr Congo. Or the "economy" formed by insects trading pollen services for nectar with plants. That's how small and weak the economy of the leftover people with no access to the global industrial machine would be by comparison.

[cutemonster]

Kensington in Philadelphia right:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington,_Philadelphia the Crime section

But you didn't mention the Soldier class. Some security people are needed, with an ok decent life, to keep the masses in check, and put up surveillance cameras and collect everyone's photos and biometrics

A bit like in Uganda, "Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40603692

[galdosdi]

If a soldier class is needed, they will be the new middle class. But they may not.

> Now, OTOH, if at that point, robot/AI weapons are sufficient so you only need 10 people to run the entire US Army.... then it's game over.

[theamk]

Have you seen "good vs services employment" graphs, like this one? [0]

Number of people producing goods has been shrinking for a longest time, its under 20% now. It'll likely keep shrinking as automation becomes more advanced, and in the future "service" would be much more important.

When I was a kid, I've read some sci-fi stories about societies like those, where most people were working in service industry.

[0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2023/09/0...

[hammock]

That graph is US only

[vivekd]

Good point - the graph being US only means it misses offshoring manufacturing jobs to places like China. We can't assume that the loss of manufacturing jobs was solely caused by automation

[eru]

Why call it 'loss', if it was outsourced? UnAmericans are also human.

[TOMDM]

Where else would you apply this reasoning? If I lose my phone it doesn't stop being a phone...

[eru]

Yes, but it's probably useless for anyone else (because of locking).

And if you break your phone, it stops being a (useful) phone.

[trealira]

Why do you think the word "loss" implies they think non-Americans aren't human?

[justinclift]

Pretty sure the point was that the jobs are just being moved around, not "lost".

[alfiopuglisi]

If you own enough of these automated factories, you don't need to sell anything at all. Just produce whatever luxury item you want, in addition to mundane things like food and shelter (in the form of caviar and villas, because why not?).

That will mark the time when technology is advanced enough that humanity will fracture with small independent groups going out and fending for themselves, possibly in outer space. Some SF scenarios call them "great houses", because they somewhat resemble feudal kingdoms where a kind of extended family rules, except there are no peasants.

[Aperocky]

I think this is purely focused on the supply side and neglecting demand and its role in the economy.

The world economy today isn't driven by lack of supply (for the vast majority categories of products), rather it is by lack of demand. Whoever owns the demand owns the power in this dynamic. One can have all the factories in the world when consumer stop buying it's in for a rough time, like China is finding out.

[immibis]

Demand can be easily manufactured, it seems. Just look at all the bullshit people buy, from fidget spinners to timeshares to ready-made chocolate cake.

[ryandrake]

We have entire industries dedicated to creating demand for things that would otherwise not be demanded (advertising), and enabling people to buy things they cannot afford (debt). I'd expect both of these industries to balloon during the late stages as people get further squeezed out of voluntarily participating in the economy.

[shiroiushi]

I don't think anyone with half a brain is buying a timeshare these days. Those things have been going down for many years now I think. They were a stupid fad, and the fad's over. Of course, some new bullshit fad will come along for people to waste their money on.

What's wrong with ready-made chocolate cake? Freshly-baked might be better, but there is value in convenience. It's the same reason people buy pizza: if you're a master pizza chef and have a proper pizza oven at home, you could probably make a better pizza, and of course have it a bit fresher, but most people simply can't make a pizza that comes close to those made in real pizza ovens by people who make them every day. Some people don't even have an oven in the first place.

[corimaith]

On an aggregate level, no. Those things you've listed only occur when times are good and the gravy train is running. In a recession or hyperinflation it's a different matter altogether. China would certainly want that magical ability for their economy right now if they could.

[Ajedi32]

That sounds like a very low-margin business, if literally anyone can create and maintain it with close to zero human input. Its like the sci-fi equivalent of generating books with AI and selling them on Amazon. The cost of goods produced by your hypothetical business would plummet, and the real value would simply shift somewhere else that is still able to benefit from human labor or ingenuity.

If you're talking about a world where AI has become so advanced that humans have literally nothing to contribute to society, in any field, then that's called a post-scarcity society, where the very concept of a "business owner" (not to mention the concepts of "business" and "owner") starts to lose all meaning.

[dangrossman]

The fictional automated business may cost tens of billions of dollars to build. That means almost no one, not literally anyone, can create it. If a small group of giant conglomerates are the only companies wealthy enough to build these automated factories, then there's no competition to drive down prices, and no automatic path to a post-scarcity society. Instead, it's the dystopia ryandrake described.

[Ajedi32]

> If a small group of giant conglomerates are the only companies wealthy enough to build these automated factories

So AI can build everything except the factory itself? Sounds like there's still a need for human labor.

And if the opposite is true and AI can build the factory, then it's not going to "cost tens of billions of dollars to build"; the factory will be just as cheap as the goods its producing. Literally everyone could have their own factory.

[mewpmewp2]

Maybe the resources, materials and land is the constraint here.

So whoever builds the first one will be able to quickly expand, buy more land and solidify their lead.

Land is likely what would cost billions in this specific scenario.

If you don't have land or materials then there is nothing your AI can do, because it doesn't have anything to build things from.

[Ajedi32]

I do think in the case where a company is benefiting from the exploitation of limited natural resources (like land) that don't naturally belong to any one person, imposing a tax on that does make sense.

There was a podcast I listened to on this subject "The Plunder of the Commons" which I found really interesting. [1]

That said, we're a long ways away from reaching the point where literally not having anywhere left on the planet to build becomes your primary obstacle to starting a business.

[1]: https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/the-plunder-of-the-com...

[kwere]

high tech "machinery" is the constraint for most capital intensive businesses

[hgomersall]

Or the state will do it.

[Xen9]

The end game is that average human becomes a pet.

Horses weren't needed and they became pets; same for average human.

This can only happen perfectly if the manufacturers eventually start to come after those who are self-reliant, which I believe is in line with the psychology of humans.

Funny thing is this is ALSO analogous to what we have done certain animals.

[Xen9]

Further analogy: Holding $100 US dollar bill in front of the pets, one can make them do lots of tricks. The pets are willing; like dogs that want to play, they will send tons of CVs to potential owners and give do anything to gain advantage in an interview.

This makes me wonder, what happens to the dogs.

[indigoabstract]

I wonder who decides which humans are needed and which ones are not (whom you call pets) and will it be someone other in the future than who has made those decisions today and in the past?

What exactly will be different in the future from the current situation?

[csomar]

Onlypets.com. I see the future now.

[Xen9]

The most correct use for this analogues of owners, hermits and pets is as tool of desconstructing the cyberpunk genre.

It's no longer human culture in animal nature; but owner culture in anthroposcenic nature.

What happens when one that can live centuries in an intellectual enlightened form lives in a world of pollutatition, cities, old infastructure—and of course the organic leftovers?

---

Noteworthy to say this makes up perhaps half of cyberpunk's foundations—one should not ever define cyberpunk solely with this idea.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

You’re thinking of slavery with extra steps.

[jncfhnb]

Don’t think that needed clarification from “pet”

[cutemonster]

Pets are treated pretty well usually? "Cattle" may be a better word?

[Xen9]

The distinction between a pet and a cattle is that the cattle the owner has a dependency to but a pet may one can dispose at will. To the treatment of pets I would say that the treatment has less relevance than the complete stripping of autonomy for after your existence has become an instrument of one's will, your the meaning of your existence ceases the moment one finds a better tool. ALSO I would argue that this – especially, in the historical sense – may well be the essence & causality of this WHOLE thing.

[jncfhnb]

A well treated slave is still a slave

[snapcaster]

Pet ownership is slavery

[cutemonster]

Say that to my parents cat if you dare!

[ChoGGi]

Ohh la la, somebody's gonna get laid in college

[john2x]

Horses don't revolt

[cutemonster]

Humans also won't, in tomorrow's surveillance society

(or today's, in some places)

[Xen9]

Soviet revolution comes to mind.

[cutemonster]

That's not comparable to Russia today. Now there are surveillance cameras, internet surveillance and machine learning, but not back then.

Also it wouldn't have happened hadn't it been for Gorbatjov who introduced the glasnost (transparency) policy reform. Another Stalin, and history would have looked different.

[Xen9]

I did not intend it as a serious point. However, the Zuboffian trade that you mention will end in most of the species having no autonomy left to trade for comfort, completing a historical trend: land ownership for service access, self-sufficiency for product quality et cetera

[geraneum]

> harvesting money every quarter

How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work. Sometimes people forget that the workers are also consumers. You may displace some, but to replace all, blue and white? Not that easy.

[shiroiushi]

>How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work.

The idea is that you sell your stuff to people who are employed in other industries/companies that haven't been so successful at automating all their employees out of a job.

At Samsung, for instance, the workers are not the main consumers: Samsung is a huge exporter, and most of their customers are outside of Korea. Even if all their current and former employees suddenly decided to stop buying Samsung products, it wouldn't even be noticeable in their balance sheet.

What you're describing is a situation where all the companies have managed to eliminate most of their workforces, which has never happened. If it comes even remotely close to that point, societies will be forced to change their economies somehow, perhaps with UBI.

[alexey-salmin]

This is the theme of the "Twenty-fourth Voyage of Ijon Tichy" by Stanisław Lem. Goods are mass-produced but no one has income to buy them. In the end they asked AI to find the way out of this deadlock. The AI found the solution of crushing them all and arranging their remains in visually aesthetic patterns. Funniest part is that they voluntarily went along with this plan because they could see no other.

The whole "Star Diaries" series is such a gem. Many stories are exploring this question of "what is the endgame for societal trajectory X" in a form of some remote planet that Tichy visits on his trip.

[Tade0]

The many will quite simply stop having children, because why bother? Then the mgic box owners will attempt doing something to have a population to sell to, but that will ultimately fail.

It can be argued that it already started - globally the number of children born peaked around 2013-2017. The pandemic only accelerated the process.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

There was a short in the second batch of Love, Death and Robots[0] (Netflix), that had a cop, whose job it was, to kill children of "poors," as the rich could live practically forever, and didn't want the competition.

[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/80174608 (Volume 2: "Pop Squad").

[JumpCrisscross]

> Eventually, business owners will no longer need people at all

Maybe? This has been hypothesised since the Industrial Revolution. We’re nowhere close to labour obsolescence.

[bibliotekka]

The richest and most powerful will lobby for universal basic income because it will benefit them at some tipping point, where the masses will need to be subsidized to keep the consumption machine running, maybe?

[cjbgkagh]

I think the middle class feels safer with the notion that the economy will not survive without them, thus whatever system results must maintain some sort of middle class. I don’t think this is true at all, while not ideal many places continue to operate just fine with a few very rich and everyone else very poor.

The consumption machine has a wealth effect which is an artifact of a ponzie economy. This mathematically cannot last forever, even if it has lasted for a long time and will continue to last for a long time. What matters to wealth is production. Traditionally highly technical production needed a decent middle class, but efficiencies mean fewer such people are needed to maintain the same proficiency. Coupled with globalization where a smart person anywhere can design technical things that can then be used everywhere. This decouples the wealth of the rich from the health of the middle class and the rich would be happily sacrifice the middle class in the alter of cheaper labor and will whisper sweet nothings in your ear while doing so. Not them personally but the people they pay to operate on their behalf. To me it makes perfect sense to promise UBI to undermine resistance and then not deliver on that promise to again undermine resistance. I think the middle class would be fools to believe that UBI will come and save them.

[kwere]

yeah, to bargain one needs strenght, on such scenario, UBI would mostly like benevolence of the powerful to stabilize their power structures. The masses will comply with UBI or not

[csomar]

UBI will benefit them in the sense that work will no longer be a right; since now you get that government pay check. No one wants to keep the consumption machine running for your benefit. The rich can always get a bigger yacht and more holiday residences.

UBI is a power play and the worst outcome for a sovereign citizen.

[hermannj314]

In a post scarcity society, capitalism dies as will most of the population on Earth. The elite will live in an amazing utopia with AI slaves and like a few million fellow humans.

Eugenics has always been the end game for the monarch class. Capitalism was a stepping stone.

[huijzer]

I think you can find businesses like this already. They only have a few capable people and that’s it. For example, MasterCard, Visa, RenTec, and probably some hedge funds somewhere.

[prewett]

You're telling me that of MasterCard's 33,000 employees and Visa's 28,800 employees, only a "few" are "capable"? Either management is negligently incompetent or, well, maybe the hubris is from a different direction.

[huijzer]

Well Visa does have about half a million net income per employee (assuming 17 billion net income which they reported in 2023), but yes you’re right. I thought the number was lower.

[nradov]

The notion of a factory that repairs itself is so hilarious to anyone who has worked in a real factory. After a few years of operation, all of the production machinery is constantly on the edge of breaking down. It takes continuous effort to keep things working at all, plus there are always changes for design updates and new models.

[fuzzfactor]

>Humanity consists of the few who own all the boxes, living in opulent luxury, and the many who don't and barely subsist

To me that represents lingering inhumanity.

There are still plenty of people around the world who have maintained this high lifestyle proudly since their early ancestors first got into opulent condition. But there are even more descendants who have not been able to maintain a previous level of opulence at all and would do anything to get it back.

Then you've got a whole bigger group who never came close and are even more envious than those who once had luxury. So much of the time it's easy to recognize that improved wealth is a result of fortune one way or another. When you get an aggregate amount of greed focused on manipulating fortunes, the best they can do for themselves is when everyone else ends up barely subsisting.

IIRC, civilization was supposed to bring an end to the barely subsistence thing.

Doesn't look too civil when things trend backward toward medieval.

[csomar]

In this case, there is no end game since Samsung exports these products. The money will keep flowing. Your logic makes sense only in a closed system.

The government will then redirect that labour to other stuff they can make and export; and make more money.

[mywittyname]

Eventually the "fully-automated factory in a box" will be widely available and the race to the bottom will work its way up the chain.

You can already see this at work on platforms like Etsy or Amazon. People are buying tools like crickets, CNC, or 3d printers, then starting a business selling their products (often copies of other successful products) on these platforms.

Eventually, someone will make copy-cat platforms, then someone else will build a tool for building copy-cat platforms, etc. There's no end game, it's just a loop of people trying to replicate the success of others.

[Blackthorn]

Historically, violence has been at least somewhat successful as a disincentive for this. Hasn't always fixed the immediate problem but the threat of it, and eventual implementation, kept too much of a gap from happening.

[kybernetikos]

I doubt it'll work this time though though, since we are beginning to make big strides in automating violence too. The people who own the boxes will own the murderbots too.

[reginald78]

You probably don't even need automated violence for this anyway. High quality cheap pervasive surveillance allows you to deploy a small group of thugs to crush any smaller movements before they get large enough to be a real threat. Kill bots would make it even easier, more efficient and even less limited of course but I don't think it changes the equation much.

[Blackthorn]

They always owned the police anyway.

[kybernetikos]

True but police are people too with their own expectations and morality and the number of police required to suppress a population is relatively large.

There's still enormous room for abuse, but automating suppression drops even the imperfect checks that we have on the power of the few to oppress the many

[ryandrake]

> True but police are people too

That can be solved, too. Some other (now deleted?) comment mentioned the inevitability of killbots, which will have to be created and deployed for this dystopia to stick. The elite living in Elysium will need a controllable, automate-able, way to keep the underclass in line, one that doesn't involve less-reliable human enforcers.

[shiroiushi]

>The elite living in Elysium will need a controllable, automate-able, way to keep the underclass in line, one that doesn't involve less-reliable human enforcers.

I thought the rich elites living in Elysium had to completely depend on one weird mercenary dude on Earth with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher that somehow had rockets that could achieve escape velocity in order to protect Elysium from spaceships with illegal immigrants attempting to invade and use their magic healing machines.

[Blackthorn]

It's a historical fact that the police (or police-adjacent things before they were called the police) have always been quite willing to crack the skulls of workers.

[dotancohen]

  > police-adjacent things before they were called the police

It seems that you have some history you could share, I would love to hear it.

[cageface]

It seems increasingly likely to me that we're going to see the standard sci-fi script flipped. Instead of AI and robots doing grunt work for humans, AI will be doing most of the decision making, perhaps guided by a small human elite, and humans will do most of the grunt work.

Making machines that think will turn out to be a lot cheaper and easier than building machines that can do general purpose physical work. People are cheap to make and maintain, especially if you're not very concerned with their well-being.

[eru]

People are pretty expensive.

So far we have automated more and more, including and especially grunt work.

Why would grunt work come back?

Especially if you have machines that can help you design more efficient machines, and can help you re-design production processes to be more efficient and amenable to further automation.

[cageface]

People in first world countries, with education, health care, good housing etc are expensive.

If you're willing to deny them all that then they're cheap and easy to replace.

Whereas building a machine that can do even the basics of what a human hand can do is quite expensive.

[eru]

> If you're willing to deny them all that then they're cheap and easy to replace.

It's not about what the employer is willing to do, it's about what people are willing to accept; especially if there's competition for their services.

> Whereas building a machine that can do even the basics of what a human hand can do is quite expensive.

We even have robots that can wash dishes, and they are cheap enough to be in a substantial proportion of households. There's lots of of basics and not so basics that we automated.

Of course, build a machine that can do _all_ the basics of a human hand is expensive (at least so far). But people can and have arranged their business processes around these limitations: you don't expect your welding robots to wash dishes; you use a dishwasher for that.

[cageface]

I take it you've never lived in a developing country? People there don't have much bargaining power.

For example, when I lived in Vietnam I'd often see a road crew of ten people with shovels because it was cheaper than hiring one backhoe. A washing machine would be an unimaginable luxury for all of them.

[eru]

I grew up in (now former) East Germany, and the autobiography of the first leader of my adopted home is literally called 'From Third World to First'.

Though I'm not sure what you are trying to say? I guess you are agreeing with me? Yes, if there are many companies that compete for your services and can put them to productive use, you have a lot of bargaining power in those negotiations. Conversely, where those options are lacking, you have less bargaining power.

Yes, Vietnam started from a fairly low base, but has seen phenomenal growth in the last few decades. See eg https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/VNM?zoom=V... You can bet your hat that workers' absolute bargaining power has improved by leaps and bounds.

As a consequence, at https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/wages you can see how average Vietnamese wages have exploded over time. (Even if their data only goes back to 2011, the growth is still very impressive.)

Apparently washing machines are a real growth segment in Vietnam: https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/household-appliances/ma...

These days around 58% of households in Vietnam have a washing machine.

Yes, in general many people around the world used to be dirt poor. And while things have improved, many of these people merely graduated from 'dirt poor' to 'poor'. But that's still progress, and we are continuing to advance. To future generations, even our richest people alive today will look poor by comparison.

[immibis]

Pretty much this. We see it starting to happen already. When's the last time a really big company actually did something to improve its product for its users and thereby get more money from users, as opposed to either raising the price, or improving its product for people who are not the users at the detriment of the users? They do this because the users aren't where the money is - money is concentrated among rich people, and the best way to make more money is to pander to other rich people.

[Teever]

The eventual end game is a self replicating machine.

It'll start with just businesses owning the prototypes of them but once common folk know that such a machine is possible they'll build one themselves and then use it to build as many as they want.

If it's a very large machine it will be miniaturized until it fits inside the human body and everyone will have synthetic ribosomes that can be used to produce whatever they want provided they have access to enough energy and raw material.

What happens then is anyone's guess.

[DiscourseFan]

Well, no. Labor value decreases, but hours stay the same since more can be produced in the same time. This creates surplus value, which is taken by whoever controls the means of production. Workers, realizing they are being cut out, strike, negotiate higher wages. Rinse and repeat (this, if you ask the progressives at least!)

[DonnyV]

The end game is once corporations don't need people to work or for security. Thats when kingdoms will return. They will act like monarchy's. We're already starting that transition now. Different parts of the US State departments have been captured by corporations. Bending them to their will. They're stealing public waterways, land, ground resources.

[amelius]

That's not the end game because ultimately voters determine the rules of the economic system.

And if voting doesn't work, there's the possibility of a revolution.

So the capital owners will probably make it so that they please a majority of people just enough to stay in power.

[p1esk]

Or they simply kill everyone who complains.

[analog31]

Going further, if nobody can afford to buy goods, then there will be no need for factories.

[Nasrudith]

The "logical conclusion" is frankly a bad extrapolation as hinted by the number of times 'magical' appears in it. A magical fully-automated self-maintaining and repairing factory isn't a very good model for the real world even with advances.

We've already seen how over-invested LLMs have gotten relative to their financial returns. A magical AI box with optimal business decisions is even more fantastical - computibility isn't there, and the resulting homogeneity of a 'perfect' approach in business strategy would by game theory promote decisions counter to the prevalent strategies.

The more likely result in a dynamic world is a market crash in the domain of factories as everyone and their dog tries to get in on the "free easy money, last chance to get rich!". The end profit margins would be tight indeed and collapsed values of good.

Not to mention the whole value of money is that it can get you other goods and services while shielding you from the logistical hellscape of trying to DYI. If everything is being auto-produced anyway then currency isn't even desirable a commodity, now is it?

[yMEyUyNE1]

> Eventually, business owners will no longer need people at all.

Who will they sell to? For business/markets to exist, it needs people who can buy.

[squigz]

Where are they going to harvest money from? If people can't work, they can't buy things.

[ClassyJacket]

Kind of like the system we already have with landlords.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Hopefully a land tax

[mschuster91]

Well... yes, for capitalism, that is the endgame. Neo-feudalism to be precise.

And unlike the last times where feudalism was overthrown, these days police is often enough on par with the military, and the governments can track us whenever and wherever we want by the tiny little bugs we carry around in our pockets. Call for a revolution or for violent acts online, and a day later the FBI knocks on your door and takes everything digital you have.

[cjbgkagh]

I worry that people don’t understand how much violence it took to obtain enlightenment values and that such values may only be a quirk of history. We are very fortunate to live in such a time that is not the natural and default norm for humanity. I worry that attempts to further the gains will fail and we will not only not make additional gains but lose what we had with no possible way or regain even enlightenment values in our lifetimes or any number of lifetimes.

[shiroiushi]

>these days police is often enough on par with the military

I'm pretty sure this is completely unique to the USA.

[AngryData]

And even then it is bullshit. US cops have dogshit training and the majority of them are cowards. Sure they got more guns than cops in other countries, but the population has even more.

[kelseyfrog]

> I wonder what the eventual end game is

The end game for the US is a small group of people(approx 36M) having fun. It's not too different from how it is now, but rather than be supported by human labor, it's supported by the labor of machines.

If all wage labor is automated, and ignoring the issue of the social and political implications of a mass of people with nothing else to do, the remaining professions will be SME business owners, investors, and landlords[1].

We can estimate the size of this population.

There are approximately 28 million American SMEs[2]. SMEs can have owner-employees or hired labor, all of which will be automated. Considering SMEs as financial black boxes, the inputs, and outputs remain the same with the exception that salaries are replaced by a presumably smaller figure representing either the purchase or rental of automated labor.

An estimated 7 million[3] high-net-worth individuals(HNWI) reside in the US. These are people with large investment portfolios who can live off gains indefinitely. It's difficult to estimate the number of full-time investors, but some estimate range from 200k-1million, and arguably, and these are folks who are doing potentially automatable work anyways.

The upperbound of US landlords is 10.6 million people[4], or 7.1%. There are 5.9 million[5] commercial buildings in the US, compared to 44 million[6] residential rental properties. Let's estimate the number of commercial landlords to be around 1 million people in the US. We can also presume that maintenance and repair is automatable labor.

The common features these groups share is the ability to generate income without labor. Presumably, this leaves them plenty of time to engage in leisure activities.

Looking toward HNWI individuals as an indicator, they spend much more of their time engaged in "active" leisure, that is to say praying, socializing, exercising, hobbies, and volunteering[7].

1. I'm assuming self-employed people are automated away.

2. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...

3. https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/world-we...

4. https://www.doorloop.com/blog/landlord-statistics-by-categor...

5. https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environm...

6. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187577/housing-units-occ...

7. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2019/07/13/how-do-t...