[irjustin]

Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real.

This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.

The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?

Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.

[rogerrogerr]

If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.

My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.

Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t like out of partaking from them? That’d make some sense.

If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run pretty great open source models that seem a few months behind SOTA?

[intended]

IMO - Money will NEVER stops making sense.

Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to art, labor to goods. Green to triangle.

Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.

[Quekid5]

In a word: it's fungible[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

[scotty79]

> Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.

So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions.

[bluefirebrand]

> So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions

Which you will always have some need for, because resources aren't infinite, real estate isn't infinite, services aren't infinite, etc

[FabHK]

> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense.

There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.

The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.

Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.

[majormajor]

What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?

People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time?

--

The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?

[scotty79]

> What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?

Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.

[UltraSane]

That just seems very wasteful when proof-of-stake works.

[scotty79]

It's not really wasteful if you use excess energy for mining that you couldn't store because storage is very limited.

The goal is not efficiency. The goal to provide incentive to overbuild the renewables.

[FabHK]

Or even good old centralised distributed systems that do it another 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more efficiently than PoS.

[scotty79]

It sounds terrible when you approach it from the point of money. Of course you can do money more efficiently. But if you approach this form the side of energy it's a way to organically tie a value to any energy produced. Even the energy produced at times when production vastly exceeds the demand. And that's going to be most of the energy produced since we need to develop renewables capacity and can't really wait for the storage technologies that lag horribly so we can match the supply the demand.

This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.

[bluefirebrand]

> But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off

Probably extremely bloody revolt and collapse

[noduerme]

Only if you assume people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have, as opposed to wanting a little more to survive. History shows the opposite.

[bluefirebrand]

> History shows the opposite.

I strongly disagree, everything I know about history points the other way

Human history is littered with "people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have"

Look at the conflicts happening right now in Ukraine, or Israel

Come on, be serious

[motorest]

> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.

If you can make many replicators, you certainly won't be providing them to anyone else. You'd be using them to ensure that money starts funneling into your revenue stream, and use that as a cash cow to pursue other projects.

[simonh]

That’s only a temporary possibility, once the tech gets out everyone will have replicators.

[card_zero]

What are they replicating? Patented things, copyrighted things? Or groceries? Do they want to replicate things? In Star Trek, they travel light, wear uniforms, and have few personal possessions, because they're on a ship, in the navy. That's why everything has to be digital and everybody stuffs their life inside a phonecorder and drinks synthale. When he's back on earth, Picard has a horse. I could be wrong but I don't think he replicated it.

[heavyset_go]

Just like everyone owns factories today

[x______________]

  You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.

So what's stopping you from replicating a power source and battery?

Seems analogous to LLM's: replicators replicate but do not create. Information would then seem to the proper choice for a new currency..

[SoftTalker]

But energy is essentially free also, at least on the margin, and if we're talking about sunlight.

[petre]

Sure. And AI will only run at peak solar times.

[lukan]

Did you know, that there is always a place on earth enjoying peak solar time right now?

[delusional]

> Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship

You're taking the wrong lesson from that observation. Models that people actually use are just as censored now as they ever were. What changed was the the hysterical anti-censorship babies realized that it's not that big of a problem, at least acutely.

[bluefirebrand]

> I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.

It has nothing to do with how cheap the goods are

The problem is that at some point people won't be able to afford literally anything because all, and I mean literally all, of the wealth will be hyper concentrated in a super small percentage of the population

[squigz]

Do you have anything to support this hypothesis?

[heavyset_go]

https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf

[squigz]

Link's broken.

[heavyset_go]

https://web.archive.org/web/20250126183923/https://delong.ty...

This should work

[neel8986]

Simple hypothesis. Top 5percent of US wealth now belongs to top 50 richest American. Even if you ignore corruption, lobbying and any ill intent you can definitely conclude that this top 50 individuals have better way of getting return from money than rest of the population. Even if if their delta of return is 5% we can assume that withing next 50 years there is a high probability that these guys will own 30-50% of wealth. I have a strong belive AI will acclerate that further.

[prewett]

But all your numbers (except maybe top 5% one) are completely made up. Strong beliefs don't prevent one from being completely wrong. Neville Chamberlain has a strong belief that he had ensured peace; Einstein had a strong belief that quantum theory's "spooky action at a distance" was incorrect. Both were wrong. Fifty years is a long time, and anything could happen. The last fifty years had the fall of Communism, the EU, China going from an impoverished countryside to a superpower, video phones in our pocket, social media upending communication and mental health, renewable energy displacing coal, Trump, etc.

[squigz]

Not to mention that 50% of US wealth is only 15% of the world's total wealth - a far cry from "literally all wealth"

[twoodfin]

But these aren’t replicators owned by a monopolist. There are a number of highly funded, highly competitive vendors at every level of the stack.

[moralestapia]

Sure, but you're not one of them.

[rogerrogerr]

Sure, but who do they sell stuff to if no one has a job? We’re on the brink of some _very_ unexplored branches of human behavior.

[Buttons840]

That's the key. The poor are useful to business so long as they are a source of money and power. What happens if the time comes that the poor have nothing the rich want?

[heavyset_go]

The rich will need play things. Think Westworld, but with real people.

[bluefirebrand]

Historically in this case eventually the poor kill the rich

Probably not this time though

[64718283661]

If they killed the poor, then how can they enjoy their power over people?

[Lio]

I guess that’s why Larry, Zuck and Thiel, et al want constant recording of the plebs, so that ‘citizens will be on their best behaviour’.

This time there will be no revolution but it will be televised. :P

[noduerme]

It's strange that socialists seem more concerned with their material possessions than anyone else.

[delusional]

The poor will always have the only thing the rich want. Labor. Without labor Trump cannot slather the white house in gold. Without labor Zuck cannot smoke meats. Without labor Musk cannot troll people on X.

The rich do not want anything you have, they want you. Body and soul.

[lukan]

Robots can take most of the jobs, but the feeling of power over other humans they likely cannot replace.

[Buttons840]

I mean, eventually like 1 person is going to have more wealth than 60% of the nation combined. At that point, why even bother trying to earn customers or appeal to the lower half when you can instead curry favor with that 1 person.

[tbossanova]

Oh, the rich will be very happy wielding sadistic power over the poor

[happymellon]

They will always want entertainment.

Whether it's gladiators or bum fights, the poor will ultimately be given a job. Robot wars was fun, but UFC has stayed.

[irjustin]

This is why revolts happen.

If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to keep revolutions at bay. The balance of tax the ultra wealthy vs giving people enough to "live comfortably" is always the job of governance.

[scotty79]

> If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to keep revolutions at bay.

It's also putting money in the hands of the consumers so the rich can compete between themselves at how much each can scoop back up.

Something like feeding animals in the forest to compete with your friends at who can hunt better.

When poor have nothing then you have to shift to taking money of the other rich, but they are clever, so it's easier to take a little bit from the hands of all rich equally, give that money to the poor and reduce the new problem to the old one, how to extract as much as you can from the poor.

[dinkumthinkum]

The first sentence is definitely. But, UBI is a nerd/socialist fantasy. It would nevet work and will never happen. Everyone with these sci-fi fever dreams of what will happen if AI collapses white collar jobs are coming from people that don’t know how the world or people actually work outside of their daydreams. People aren’t going to just be like “ok, well I guess it’s time for bread and water and Soviet style tenement housing, all this progress in livings was great while it lasted.” And other people are talking about using batteries for money or something. People need to touch grass.

[intended]

This is very explored - it was the state of humanity for most of its existence. The few had resources, the many were poor.

[Fricken]

For most of humanity's existence nobody was poor because there was no such thing as money.

[zo1]

We're nearly-there. The humans then become the capital/resource to be acquired, not money.

That's why every country is somehow chasing that elusive "population growth". It creates more "things" to own, whether that be money by virtue of more people creating more money through economic activity or simply more people to claim as "yours" (for the elites/leaders).

[lemonlearnings]

Bots. Agentic consumers.

[ok_dad]

Imagine a few billionaires pay big bucks to keep AGI to themselves and let the rest of us die on the vine.

[rogerrogerr]

Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn’t we just… make a parallel economy without the AGI? The world works today without AGI.

[AngryData]

Or use any of the wonders of military technology invented in the last 200 years to take back society. These fuckers have lived in prosperity for so long that they don't even think it is possible. But so many people throughout history thought they were untouchable until the masses decided they had enough of their shit. Kings with professional armies, full plate knights, men with cannons, mens with guns, machine guns, bombs, planes, tanks, helicopters, and yet at the end of the day when enough random people are pissed off enough the mass of people with nothing to lose are the ones who "win" in the end with the powerful dead or hiding.

[lemonlearnings]

Parallel economies are banned. Try making a new currency in the US.

[palmotea]

> Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn’t we just… make a parallel economy without the AGI? The world works today without AGI.

Because you need things they want. Like why would they spare the electricity to heat your home, when it could go to "better" use powering a few dozen GPUs serving a billionaire? Why would they spare the land for you to grow food, when they could use it to build ziggurats dedicated to their power (or whatever else is their whim)?

The market sends the scarce resources to those with the most money.

[card_zero]

What is the fantasy AGI supposed to be that's so great for billionaires to have? A human baby is an <s>A</s>GI, it won't tell you the Ultimate Answer, or even a penultimate one, because it has no way to know.

No, seriously, what? You think an AGI is going to be a willing slave and endowed with special knowledge? Where does either part of that come from?

[jfyi]

The world of Star Trek was fully post scarcity. Rich/poor were not things that existed.

They had to get through this before things got better: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots

[jobigoud]

> The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts

This never happens. It's not the relative wealth gap that creates revolts it's the poverty/bad conditions in absolute terms.

If the lower class conditions improve, even just a little bit, there is no revolt.

[7952]

Ultimately labour goes and works on something else instead. And the availability of free labour makes that possible. New industries and markets develop as a result. But a huge number of people will be left behind. But people will focus on things that were a lower priority before.

[forgetfreeman]

I have bad news for you, we've run out of sectors to pretend labor could be funneled towards. Manufacturing and agriculture are highly automated, service industry is full tf up, and nobody can afford more construction.

[7952]

What about medical, elder care, fitness, leisure. Even service industries that focus on a more human connection. Or jobs focused on nature, the environment etc.

And i don't think this would nbe an easy process or something that could or would be managed. But it is probably already happening.

[flanked-evergl]

Thought experiments in science work because there are falsifiable scientific theories that make definite predictions about the world than can be tested.

What you wrote is not that.

[noduerme]

Yeah, but which tech has not had a homegrown variant that ultimately democratized it? Makes me think of the "feed" vs the "seed" in "The Diamond Age".