[zaptrem]

Alternatively:

-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI

-- Corporate profits drop (or growth slows) and there is demand from the powers that be to increase taxation in order to increase the UBI.

-- People can afford the products and services.

Unfortunately, with no jobs the products and services could become exclusively entertainment-related.

[VikRubenfeld]

Let's say AI gets so good that it is better than people at most jobs. How can that economy work? If people aren't working, they aren't making money. If they don't have money, they can't pay for the goods and services produced by AI workers. So then there's no need for AI workers.

UBI can't fix it because a) it won't be enough to drive our whole economy, and b) it amounts to businesses paying customers to buy their products, which makes no sense.

[kadushka]

So then there's no need for AI workers.

You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources. They will also control robots with guns.

Less than 100 years ago we had a guy who convinced a small group of Germans to seize power and try to exterminate or enslave vast majority of humans on Earth - just because he felt they were inferior. Imagine if he had superhuman AI at his disposal.

In the next 50 years we will have different factions within elites fighting for power, without any regard for wellbeing of lower class, who will probably be contained in fully automated ghettos. It could get really dark really fast.

[VikRubenfeld]

>> So then there's no need for AI workers.

> You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources.

Let me rephrase that from 'So then there's no need for AI workers.' to 'So then there's no money to pay for AI workers.'

The UBI approach creates a closed economic loop: Company A pays taxes → Government gives UBI to consumers → Consumers buy from Company A → Company A pays taxes... This is functionally identical to Company A directly paying people to buy Company A's products, which makes no economic sense.

It's like Ford paying his workers $50/day, but the only customers buying Ford cars are Ford workers spending their $50/day wages. Ford would go bankrupt - there's no external value creation, just money circulating in circles.

Where does the actual wealth come from in this system? Who are the net buyers that make the businesses profitable enough to sustain the UBI taxes?

UBI in an AI-dominated economy can't create a functioning economy - it's just an imaginary self-licking ice cream cone.

[kadushka]

There will still be a functioning economy - serving the elite class. There will be a million people total who control all the resources. These people will form a new society, will have their own government, their own laws, their own values, products, services, etc. Everybody else will be out of luck: at first they will be given "UBI", then they will be cordoned into special zones, basically concentration camps, and eventually exterminated, because the elite has no need for them. Why waste resources on billions of useless humans, widely seen by elites as inferior species? They will probably make a virus to wipe us out and see that as a reboot of human race.

Or the technological singularity happens before that, and either AI will kill us all, or humans will merge with AI.

[hakfoo]

The Ford model shown has been oversimplified to the point of absurdity by using only one industry. The real economy is about flows between multiple sectors. Who's buying bread? Do they have enough disposable income to buy packaged bread or just flour to bake at home? If there's a packaged bread industry, does it become robust enough to justify buying delivery trucks from Ford?

On the other hand, on a much broader scale, the planet itself is a closed economic loop. There's a finite amount of resources and we're all just cycling most of them around back and forth.

Arguably, a significant amount of "growth" has come from taking resources that formerly were not "on the books" and putting them on. The silver in the New World wasn't in (Western) ledgers until the 1500s, the oil under the Middle East was just goo until the late 1800s. The uranium ore in your backyard suddenly got a lot more interesting after 1940.

New value can come from inventing new and useful applications for existing resources or by finding new external inputs (maybe capturing some of that radiation the giant fusion sphere overhead is blasting in our direction).

[heavyset_go]

All economic systems are self-licking ice cream cones, they sustain themselves through coercion and belief.

[Kaibeezy]

This is ringing a bell. I need to re-read The Diamond Age… or maybe re-watch Elysium… or Soylent Green… or…

[idiotsecant]

Why does there have to be a need for AI? Once an AI has the means the collect its own resources the opinions of humans regarding its market utility become somewhat less important.

[heavyset_go]

The most likely scenario is that everyone but those who own AI starves, and the ones who remain around are allowed to exist because powerful psychopaths still desire literal slaves to lord over, someone to have sex with and to someone to hurt/hunt/etc.

I like your optimism, though.

[int_19h]

People who are about to starve tend to revolt.

[mrob]

If you can build an AGI then a few billion autonomous exploding drones is no great difficulty.

[int_19h]

That doesn't really follow.

[mrob]

AGI means you win the economy. Even if it's only John von Neumann level and not ASI (which removes the economy entirely), a version of von Neumann that can clone himself and never sleeps is surely capable of organizing an automated killer drone factory of sufficient size to remove as many humans as you like.

[int_19h]

AGI just means that it can replace a human at any task - a single human. You still have compute as the bound on how many instances you can run, but even if those numbers are in the millions, the resources aren't going to magically come out of nowhere, either.

[heavyset_go]

Half of them will vote to starve themselves so they can watch the other half starve, too.

I genuinely wish what you speak of happens should reality play out that way, but I think a lot of people will die with shit eating grins on their faces, even after they run out of shit to eat, because it means someone with blue hair is starving, too.

[sveme]

When people starve and have no means to revolt against their massively overpowered AI/robot overlords, then I'd expect people to go back to sustenance farming (after a massive reduction in population numbers).

A while later, the world is living in a dichotomy of people living off the land and some high tech spots of fully autonomous and self-maintaining robots that do useless work for bored people. Knowing people and especially the rich, I don't believe in Culture-like utopia, unfortunately, sad as it may be.

[heavyset_go]

Where are they going to farm?

This is a problem our ancestors faced with the enclosure of the commons. As dispossessed subsistence farmers, they had no other option to survive other than selling their labor. Their land was privatized and with it their way of life destroyed.

We still live in the world where the commons is enclosed, subsistence farming is effectively illegal.

[morningsam]

That's assuming the AI owners would tolerate the subsistence farmers on their lands (it's obvious that in this scenario, all the land would be bought up by the AI owners eventually).

[sveme]

I wouldn't believe that any sort of economy or governmental system would actually survive any of this. Ford was right in that sense, without people with well-paying jobs, no one will buy the services of robots and AIs. The only thing that would help would be the massive redistribution of wealth through inheritance taxation and taxation on ownership itself. Plus UBI, though I'm fairly sceptical of what that would do to a society without purpose.

[atomicnumber3]

>exclusively entertainment related

We may find that, if our baser needs are so easily come by that we have tremendous free time, much of the world is instead pursuing things like the sciences or arts instead of continuing to try to cosplay 20th century capitalism.

Why are we all doing this? By this, I mean, gestures at everything this? About 80% of us will say, so that we don't starve, and can then amuse ourselves however it pleases us in the meantime. 19% will say because they enjoy being impactful or some similar corporate bullshit that will elicit eyerolls. And 1% do it simply because they enjoy holding power over other people and management in the workplace provides a source of that in a semi-legal way.

So the 80% of people will adapt quite well to a post-scarcity world. 19% will require therapy. And 1% will fight tooth and nail to not have us get there.

[idiotsecant]

You don't think that a post scarcity world would provide opportunities to wield power over others? People will always build heirarchy, we're wired for it.

[likium]

Agreed. In that world, fame and power becomes more important since wealth no longer matters.

[amarait]

Doesnt this already happen with social media, tv personas etc. Its so empty

[foxglacier]

This is something that pisses me off about anti-capitalists. They talk as if money is the most important thing and want us to all be equal with money, but they implicitly want inequality in other even more important areas like social status. Capitalism at least provides an alternative route to social status instead of just politics, making it available to more people, not less.

[hakfoo]

There are plenty of non-political routes to social status.

Ask how many of your neighbours can name three Supreme Court justices (or hell, their senators and representative) versus who can name three Khardashian sisters?

TBH, I'd hope for the end of "broad" social status. I'd love to see a retreat towards smaller circles where status is earned through displays of talent and respectable deeds, not just by dominating/manufacturing/buying a media presence.

[foxglacier]

> displays of talent and respectable deeds,

Without the external metric of how much money you make, these will be unquantifiable and subject to political manipulation. Even the definitions of what's talent and respectable can be altered to favor the politically more powerful people. Groups without a clear measure of status find arbitrary ways to define it. Look at how school kids or prisoners do it, for instance. It's nothing like what you'd love to see.

[heavyset_go]

When you find yourself getting mad at strawmen you created in your own mind, it helps to step back and read what the people you're upset at are actually saying.

When you're fighting strawmen you aren't grappling with the actual content of an argument you're purportedly opposed to, but it does serve the ego, as it's nice to tear down something you don't like but can't explain why.

[foxglacier]

It's from my experience with real people in real life. It's not a strawman. I've known people with high social status locally who wanted equality in money but didn't do anything to reduce their own social status or raise that of others. On the contrary, they sometimes maintained theirs by bullying others.

Where are the equality-wanters who want to isolate popular people from their friends and force them into relationships with people they don't like? I've never heard of that but it's the social equivalent of what communism is for money.

Somehow everyone responding seems to have completely misjudged what I said. I guess you've all been spending too much time on the internet.

[idiotsecant]

If that pisses you off that badly I think you need a few days of internet detox.

[zaptrem]

I hope there's still some sciencing left we can do better than the AI because I start to lose it after playing games/watching tv/doing nothing productive for >1 week.