[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.