[zarzavat]

> prices will have to come down

Prices of services will come down. Prices of things that require natural resources will go up.

In a hypothetical world where let's say we have AIs that can do any human job more effectively than a human, rich people who can afford to control the AIs will control society and poor people who have nothing to offer economically will live in poverty.

A good proxy for our future is Angola: an upper class who got rich off the oil boom, and a lower class who is dirt poor because they have nothing to offer the oil industry.

[Animats]

That's a generic problem with oil states. Or, more generally, where most income is generated by some centralized industry with strong government involvement. See "Dutch disease".[1] It's a strange situation in which having high income from valuable resources ends up making a state less industrial, and usually both more corrupt and poorer.

Is AI going to do this? Quite possibly. One of the symptoms is most investment capital being sucked up by the extractive industry. We're there now with AI. The current US situation is that the economy is flat except for AI companies and data centers, which are booming and are sucking up vast resources.

Most of OPEC has been through this cycle. Venezuela, Egypt, Iran, Iraq - lots of oil, but it didn't make the countries rich.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

[analog31]

This is something I've wondered for a long time. Does a software state become more like an oil state, or more like an industrial state?

[Animats]

It's becoming painfully clear that we have no idea how to run a society where machines do most of the thinking.

Maybe there will be a glut of smart people. Historically, that was the case until roughly WWII. Humans produced a certain fraction of smart people, but there were more smart people than jobs for them. Pikkety points out that through most of history, about 97-98% of the population was doing manual work. That started to change with the Industrial Revolution. Not until roughly WWII did an actual shortage of smart people develop. Hence the postwar boom in college education. Not until the 1990s did the nerds take over.

We think of a large group of smart people making society go as normal. Historically, it wasn't like that. The robust, the entitled, and the religious were in charge. Pikkety has a long analysis of this in his Capital and Ideology. Look who runs the Trump administration.

We're already at a smart people glut. In the US, only about half of college graduates find jobs that really need a college education. That's pre-AI. Now what?

[nazgul17]

Is it a good proxy, though? My intuition is that many economic effects play out very differently if they are limited to one country vs the whole world.

To make this more concrete, tax havens only work because most countries keep producing for real. AI will take all jobs, not just Angolan jobs.

[hithre]

Yes. Though it won’t be a small class of rich, it will be a couple of overpowerful families only. I don’t think we have any examples to compare too.

Also, If you control the AI, but there is no middle class to consume its product, everyone is poor and controlling the AI doesn’t bring that much.

There is still some products much more important and stable: food, water and therefore land control.

[oblio]

> Though it won’t be a small class of rich, it will be a couple of overpowerful families only. I don’t think we have any examples to compare too.

A couple of powerful families? Where power is transmitted from generation to generation?

I can't think of any examples either, it's a very novel concept.

Oh, wait. Romanovs. Merovingians. Carolingians. Capetiens. Bourbons. Habsburgs. Hohenzollerns. Tudors.

Extremely novel concept :-)

[gmerc]

You forgot monopolies break the “price must come down”.

[sulam]

I think their assumption is that there will not be enough people with money to pay the prices, monopoly-generated or not.

[generic92034]

On essential goods the prices can still be high enough to make everyone poor.

[matheweis]

> Prices of things that require natural resources will go up.

This suggests a potential equilibrium sooner rather than later .. few modern technological advances have been as resource hungry as AI