[ben_w]

Before the industrial revolution, even though money existed, "wealth" really meant "land" rather than "capital".

While we do not today need to ask how people can afford robot lawnmowers despite being unable to find work hitching ploughs to draft horses or oxen, the fears at the time of things like this did lead to mobs smashing looms.

If I have some (n) robots that can do any task a human could do, one such task must have been "make this specific robot"*. If those n can make 2n robots before they break, and it takes 9 months to do so, and the mass of your initial set of n is 100 kg, they fully disassemble the moon in roughly 52 years. Also you can give (94.2 billion * n) robots to each human currently alive.

Asking "who can afford it" at that point is like some member of the species Kenyanthropus platyops asking how many knapped flints one must gather in order to exchange for a transatlantic flight from London to Miami, and how anyone might be able to collect them if we've all stopped knapping flint due to the invention of steel:

The economics are too alien, we cannot imagine this kind of thing accurately on the basis of anything we have available with which to anchor our expectations.

* including the entire chain of tools necessary to get there from bashing rocks together.

[kiba]

Before the industrial revolution, even though money existed, "wealth" really meant "land" rather than "capital".

The industrial revolution didn't really change anything about land.

It's still a fundamental and underrated component of our economic system, arguably more important than capital. That's why Georgism is a thing Indeed, it's even contemporary to the industrial revolution.

The economics are too alien, we cannot imagine this kind of thing accurately on the basis of anything we have available with which to anchor our expectations.

I would refrain from making such wild prediction about the future. As I have pointed out, the industrial revolution didn't change the fundamental importance of land. Arguably, it's much more important, and even more relevant today given how our land use policy is disastrous for our species and climate.

So, yes. It is important to ask how consumers will pay for all these robots if they don't have any sort of income that would make using robots economical.

[ben_w]

> The industrial revolution didn't really change anything about land.

I didn't say otherwise.

I said the industrial revolution changed what wealth meant. We don't pay for rents with the productive yield of vegetable gardens, and a lawn is no longer a symbol of conspicuous consumption due to signifying that the owner/tenant is so rich they don't need all their land to be productive.

And indeed, while land is foundational, it's fine to just rent that land in many parts of the world. Even businesses do that.

I still expect us to have money after AI does whatever it does (unless that thing is "kill everyone"), I simply also expect that money to be an irrelevant part of how we measure the wealth of the world.

(If "world" is even the right term at that point).

> Arguably, it's much more important, and even more relevant today given how our land use policy is disastrous for our species and climate.

Not so; land use policy today is absolutely not a disaster for our species, though some specific disasters have happened on the scale of the depression era dustbowl or more recently Zimbabwe. For our climate, while we need to do better, land use is not the primary issue, it's about 18.4% of the problem vs. 73.2% being energy.

> So, yes. It is important to ask how consumers will pay for all these robots if they don't have any sort of income that would make using robots economical.

With a 2 year old laptop and model, making a picture with Stable Diffusion in a place where energy costs $0.1/kWh, costs about the same as paying a human on the UN abject poverty threshold for enough food to not starve for 4.43 seconds.

"How will we pay for it" doesn't mean the humans get to keep their jobs. It can be a rallying call for UBI, if that's what you want?

But robots-with-AI that can do anything a human can do, don't need humans to supply money.

[falcor84]

> enough food to not starve for 4.43 seconds

I'm having real difficulty reading this unit of measurement. Let me see if I can get this right - a typical person can survive indefinitely on 1600 calories. Let's say that these are provided by rice (which isn't sufficient for a long-term diet, but is good enough for awhile). 1600 calories of rice is about 8 cups/24h and there are about 10000 grains in a cup, so is it that an image can be generated at the same cost as:

  4.43s/86400s*8cups*10000 grains/cup

Being about 4 grains of rice?

[ben_w]

Sounds about right, but I don't have unit conversions and I'd count anything less than lifetime sustainable as gradual starvation.

[kiba]

Nope. Land is important because everything rest on it. Even radio spectrum and orbitals can be regarded as a form of 'land'.

Georgism doesn't exist in a vacuum. It wasn't like they were formulated during when the time when wealth 'meant' land. It was during the industrial revolution, possibly as a response to the problems they see in their society, problems we're still dealing with today.

No longer it merely meant land where productive yield of vegetable garden goes. Anything that capital sits on is land. That includes your factories and your datacenter. Yes, that include renting land on someone else. That's land policy.

Housing? Land policy. Pollution? Land policy. Transportation? Land policy. Can't afford to live? Likely your biggest ticket items include transportation and housing. Land is more important than ever.

Now, what does this have to do with AI? I would caution against thinking money or capital to be irrelevant or making any definitive prediction about the impact of AI or when or how they will come.

Edit: I see that you added stuff, but you have a narrow conception of land policy.

[ben_w]

> Nope. Land is important because everything rest on it. Even radio spectrum and orbitals can be regarded as a form of 'land'.

Then you define land so broadly that the empty vacuum of space, which robots are much better suited to than us, can exploit trivially when we cannot.

If you want to, that's fine, but it still doesn't need humans to be able to pay for anything.

[kiba]

The orbital are literally scarce resources, as are radio spectrum. If you have people just doing whatever, you'll get Kessler syndrome, especially as our orbits are filled with more satellites each year. Similarly you just can't have random folks blasting out radio signals at random.

Yes, satellites are robots. However, they have no agency. Incentive structure decides if we have kessler syndrome, which then direct humans to solve problems with robots.

So, yes, they are either directly analogous to or are literal form of land.

[ben_w]

Space is much more than circular orbits around earth, and is not a scarce resource — it's big enough that you can disassemble the earth, all the planets, all the stars, all the galaxies into atoms and give them so much padding it would still be considered extraordinarily hard vacuum. Something like 3.5 cubic meters per atom, though at that scale "size" becomes a non-trivial question because the space is expanding.

Which reminds me of a blog post I want to write.

> Similarly you just can't have random folks blasting out radio signals at random.

That's literally what the universe as a whole does.

You may not want it, but can definitely do it.

> Yes, satellites are robots. However, they have no agency.

Given this context is "AI", define "agency" in a way that doesn't exclude the people making the robots and the AI.

> Incentive structure decides if we have kessler syndrome, which then direct humans to solve problems with robots.

Human general problem solving capacites do not extend to small numbers such as merely 7.8e20.

For example, consider the previous example of the moon: if the entire mass is converted into personal robots and we all try to land them, the oceans boil from the heat of all of them performing atmospheric breaking.

And then we all get buried under a several mile thick layer of robots.

This doesn't prevent people from building them. The incentive structures as they currently exist point in that direction, of a Nash equilibrium that sucks.

Humans do not even know how to create an incentive structure sufficient to prevent each other from trading in known carcinogens for personal consumption even when labelled with explicit traumatic surgical intervention images and the words "THIS CAUSES CANCER" in big bold capital letters the outside.

If anyone knew how to do so for AI, the entire question of AI alignment would already be solved.

(Solved at one level, at least: we're still going to have to care about mesa-optimisers because alignment is a game of telephone).

[trashtester]

Wealth did tend to mean land if we go back to the middle ages. But wealth above the freeman farmer level also meant access to a workforce capable of working that land and access to (or protection from) a military force capable of defending that land.

With capitalism, wealth shifted to controlling "capital", ie the "means of production". Either directly or indirectly by owning money that could (through lending) carry interest. Also during capitalism, workers have for a while been able to collect a significant part of the wealth generated as salaries (even if most would spend that rather than invest it).

If AI can bring the cost of labor down to near zero, we can be going back to a world where wealth again means "land", even if mines may be more valuable than farms in such a future.

And just as in the Dark Ages of Europe, the ability to project physical power may again become necessary to hold on to those values.

This is particularly true if the entity that seeks to control the land is doing it in a way that threatens the existence of other entities, either AI's or humans.

[kiba]

I don't know what to tell you. Georgism was contemporary to the industrial revolution. The book Progress and Poverty, as described by wikipedia "investigates the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress"[1]. That sounds especially relevant to our time.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

So, yes. Wealth means "land". Especially so in the industrial revolution.

[ben_w]

Industrial revolution: roughly 1760 onwards if you count agricultural revolution as part of it.

Middle ages: 500-1500

Henry George, 1839-1897, is indeed part of the industrial revolution. @trashtester and I were both comparing what happened before the industrial revolution to what happened in it.

The valuation of land before still wasn't Georgism: the land was assumed to have productive output, and if someone didn't pay taxes based on the assumption, perhaps you couldn't because the land wasn't that productive, that's their problem.

And you know what else happened in the industrial revolution? Karl Marx and Adam Smith, the former placing workers rather than land at the root, and the latter placing capital rather than land at the root. As with HG, neither liked rent-seekers, and they were both more influential in the "solutions" than Henry George. (Not that he wasn't, they were just more).

Not that Henry George could possibly have foreseen even mere Earth orbitals as "land", let alone disassembling the moon into a swarm of robots that outnumber humans by more than humanity outnumbers a single human and which don't need to land on Earth which is good because if they did we'd all die just from them landing. Can't blame him for that, the difficulty seeing clearly this far ahead is why some call it "the singularity" (though I prefer "event horizon").

[trashtester]

> and I were both comparing what happened before the industrial revolution to what happened in it.

Sure. Just keep in mind that the period 1500-1760 also saw a lot of technological development that was laying the groundwork for the industrial revolution. Things like windmills, ever more advanced metallurgy, proto-chemistry, physics and so on.

In fact, some of this goes back to about 1000AD and the High Middle Ages. It was really mostly in the Dark Ages when land ownership (with subsistence farming and the military to defend it) was the source of most wealth. From 1000AD until now, land was gradually replaced by other economic capabilities as the main differentiating source of wealth. (Cities with cultures that produced skilled artisans, trade routes, naval capabilities, near-factory-level workshops centralizing production, etc.)

I suppose all I write above supports your view that land isn't currently the main source of wealth, but rather the ability to leverage skilled labor.

In the future, though, I do think there is a possibility that natural resources (and the physical power to protect them) may again become the main form of wealth, simply because the value of skilled labor may approach zero.