[ben_w]

Indeed.

On the plus side, if there really is no value to labour, then farm work must have been fully automated along with all the other roles.

On the down side, rich elites have historically had a very hard time truly empathising with normal people and understanding their needs even when they care to attempt it, so it is very possible that a lot of people will starve in such a scenario despite the potential abundance of food.

[skeledrew]

It's either: 1) the rich voluntarily share the means of production so everyone becomes equal, 2) the poor stage successful revolutions so they gain access to the means of production and everyone becomes equal, 3) the poor starve or are otherwise eliminated, and the survivors will be equal.

All roads lead to equality when the value of labour becomes 0 due to 100% automation.

[ben_w]

There's plenty of outcomes besides those three.

Over history, lots of underclasses have been stuck that way for multiple generations, even without the assistance of a robot workforce that can replace them economically.

Some future rich class so empowered would be quite capable of treating the poor like most today treat pets. Fed and housed, but mostly neutered and the rest going through multiple generations of selective inbreeding for traits the owners deem interesting.

[skeledrew]

Non-human pets don't have the capacity to rebel though; make humans into pets and there will again be the constant danger of rebellions as with slavery in the past. Without the economic incentive to offset.

[ben_w]

I disagree on both counts.

On the first, non-human pets rebelling is seen every time an abused animal bites their owner.

On the second, the hypothetical required by the scenario is that AI makes all human labour redundant: that includes all security forces, but it also means the AI moving around the security bots and observing through sensors is at least as competent as every human political campaign strategist, every human propagandist, every human general, every human negotiator, and every human surveillance worker.

This is because if some AI isn't all those things and more, humans can still get employed to work those jobs.

[skeledrew]

Not at all. A rebellion is an organized effort, with an implicitly delayed response to grievances. I can't think of any non-humans that organize their efforts as such. It would be a heck of a thing if a group of dogs were to plan how they'd take out their masters.

All those "jobs" you describe - and many more - would cease to be a thing, as their purported basis for existence would be no more. Any role that doesn't concretely contribute to our survival and advancement is just "busy work". People could theoretically continue to maintain some simulation of something that keeps them as a retirement, but it'd be meaningless.

[ben_w]

> Not at all. A rebellion is an organized effort, with an implicitly delayed response to grievances. I can't think of any non-humans that organize their efforts as such. It would be a heck of a thing if a group of dogs were to plan how they'd take out their masters.

Dogs in particular are pack animals, self-organisation amongst them wouldn't be at our level but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

> All those "jobs" you describe - and many more - would cease to be a thing, as their purported basis for existence would be no more. Any role that doesn't concretely contribute to our survival and advancement is just "busy work". People could theoretically continue to maintain some simulation of something that keeps them as a retirement, but it'd be meaningless.

Yes?

I think you've missed the point, though.

When your opponent has all those skills to that level and doesn't sleep and simply applies all the surveillance tech that has already been invented like laser microphones and wall-penetrating radar that can monitor your pulse and breathing, how would you manage to rebel?

How would you find a like mind to organise with, when your opponent knows what you said marginally before the slow biological auditory cortex of the person you're talking to passes the words to their consciousness? Silicon is already that fast at this task.

And that's assuming you even want to. Propaganda and standard cult tactics observably prevent most rebellions from starting. LLMs are already weirdly effective at persuading a lot of people to act against their own interests.

[simonh]

Right, such a society would have no need of human capitalists, government workers, experts, etc.

The question is, to what extent would humans still set goals and priorities, and how.

[ben_w]

> The question is, to what extent would humans still set goals and priorities, and how.

From what I hear about the US and UK governments, even the elected representatives of these governments don't really set goals and priorities, so the answer is surely "humans don't".

[theopsimist]

If truly 100% automation (including infantry/police) the most likely scenario is not any if the above; most people will be kept on some kind of minimum sustenance enough to keep them from rebelling (“UBI”) and those who disagree will either be coopted into the elite or eliminated.

[skeledrew]

There's no reason to keep anyone on minimal sustenance though. They're absolutely useless alive from an economics perspective, and so would probably be better served ground up into fertilizer or some other actually useful form.

[ben_w]

> There's no reason to keep anyone on minimal sustenance though.

No reason, except their (the rich or the AI) own personal desire to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly

> They're absolutely useless alive from an economics perspective, and so would probably be better served ground up into fertilizer or some other actually useful form.

Indeed. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."

But while some may care about disassembling this world and all non-rich-human life on it to make a Dyson swarm of data centres, there's also the possibility each will compete for how many billions of sycophants they can get stoking their respective egos.

[culopatin]

In 1, 2 and 3, any progress stops because no one is making new means of production, so we must stop population from growing. No? Who’s building the factories or whatever those means of production are?

[ben_w]

In the hypothetical where humans can no longer be employed because of AI, it is necessarily the case that AI must be able do any job at least as well as the best human for that job. That includes building factories, doing research.

[skeledrew]

The means of production are AI+robots, which self-maintain and self-replace as necessary to ensure everything else continues smoothly.

[parineum]

> 2) the poor stage successful revolutions so they gain access to the means of production and everyone becomes equal

Or a handful of the poor become the new rich, which is usually what happens in that scenario.

[skeledrew]

It would just mean the loop repeats itself until equality is achieved. Even if in the end only 1 human remains alive.

[ben_w]

Humans reproduce, there is no requirement that even destruction and death would lead to equality, not even if the elites still put themselves close enough to the rest of us as to be attackable.

For the latter point, consider that no matter how much the people of North Sentinel Island hate outsiders, they're not going to pose any risk to the rest of us.

Now, an elite whose membership includes those who want equality for the rest of us, that may create conditions for such a rebellion to succeed, but absent such from an insider (which could be encoded into the AI via either a bug or deliberately from whoever created the AI), some elite whose defence is handled by the kind of AI under consideration would not face any more of a threat from the wider population than we here in the west today face from the North Sentinel Islanders.

Note however that I'm not saying what will happen, but what is possible in various conditions. There's no guarantee of anything at this point.