[rmah]

If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).

[sdenton4]

What are ai and robots other than excess labor, waiting to be allocated? Why does the wealth have to come from the meat bags?

[pastel8739]

Who is going to buy the stuff that the AI and robots produce, then? What will the point be of producing all this stuff?

[pixl97]

>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.

--CGPGrey, Humans need not apply.

You need a paradigm shift in your mind on why the modern world looks like it does. You don't need human consumers, you just need a consumer. Any system that allows you to get the hard resources you need to produce the hard/soft resources required is simply enough. Humans are fungible for anything else that can provide manual or intellectual labor.

As a thought excercize, just imagine a bunch of AIs/robots buying/selling/trading resources between each other. Where are humans required in this?

[caconym_]

In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.

This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.

[9rx]

What is the point of producing all this stuff now?

Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.

At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.

[anigbrowl]

In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.

What are you talking about? Is this some dramatic way of saying you think some of their products are underpriced relative to their specifications?

[9rx]

I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately got stuff for free.

But, as before, it doesn't really matter as rich people aren't interested in things. They already have everything they could ever dream of and physically cannot handle even more. They are interested in social standing.

[dag100]

By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide).

And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.

Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.

[anigbrowl]

This doesn't make any sense. Apple has a pile of cash hasn't spent or invested = they have given away free product?

[TFYS]

There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.

[CalRobert]

Presumably the captains of the universe will want ever increasing luxuries and expressions of their power.

[tren_hard]

Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.

You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.

[kjkjadksj]

You act like I produce the dollars I spend. No, the government does, who debases our currency to print more.

[vel0city]

You act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more.

Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.

[repelsteeltje]

In Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...

[dag100]

I feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.

[repelsteeltje]

You are right.

The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.

[senordevnyc]

So the broken windows fallacy for the AI age?

[energy123]

Robots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.

[glitchc]

This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.

[jevndev]

This is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model.

I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements

[pixl97]

While you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life.

Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well.

LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.

[zozbot234]

Robots are already way better than people at a vast majority of manufacturing work, but there's still plenty of high-skilled manual jobs around.