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by Animats 83 days ago
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
1 comments
analog31 83 days ago
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?
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Animats 83 days ago
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?

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