[andai]

Cost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain.

That being said we already have relative superabundance and we're more miserable than ever, so it's not clear that more of it will cheer us up.

[jklinger410]

Unemployment rampant. All production remains in the hands of a few. All power (tokens) remains in the hands of a few. Goods are cheaper but no one can buy them. Path to the upper class now guarded closely by tokens, potential avenues for entrepreneurs diminish rapidly. Own an AI or compute, get someone to give you tokens, or live in poverty.

Distribution of abundance in current time is close to evil, America reducing entitlements and support (not expanding). Rampant waste. No reason to think any of this will change.

[andai]

I'm voting for your future.

[voxl]

This is the kind of commentary that is completely detached from reality: people want housing, people want food, people want gas.

It's not great that we can buy iphones (and AI is going to cause all electronics to be scarce, so much for abundance there)

[FloorEgg]

I'm confused. It seems the parent comment is saying AI proliferation could make cost of goods drop orders of magnitude and you say it's detached from reality because people don't want goods, they want housing food and gas?

Housing food and gas are goods...

Or did you mean something completely different?

[voxl]

Did you try reading their second paragraph? The one where they claim we already have an abundance of said goods?

[FloorEgg]

Yes they said "relative superabundance". Relative to history there is an abundance of most good and services (including food and housing).

As a Gen Z or Gen A I'm sure it doesn't feel this way, but that's mostly because they are comparing themselves to what they see on social media instead of comparing themselves to how people actually lived 100 years ago, or how people in developing nations lived 20 years ago.

I think point the OP was making is that as we grow abundance people will still be miserable because as expectations rise satisfaction falls. Also most people are susceptible to envy, and the more stuff there is the more statistically likely it is to be distributed unevenly.

Even if the average person's circumstances improve objectively from generation to generation, people's 's instinct are to fixate on the parts of their lives theyre unsatisfied with and to compare themselves with others who are better off - leading to subjective misery.

[andai]

The material abundance is largely present, the social fabric is destroyed. Only one of those turned out to be important for sanity.

[FloorEgg]

It's hard to untangle states from their derivatives when determining causes and effects in complex systems.

Maybe social fabric breaking down is a consequence of phase transitions, maybe it's a natural part of collective lifecycles.

Either way I suspect it has more to do with change than absolute state, and it's probably natural (and unpleasant to live through).

I feel mostly like an outsider these days in my optimism that the future will be better, especially in the medium to long term.

[CivBase]

> Cost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain.

That sounds great, but how are LLMs supposed to achieve this? You can't just say "AI will make a utopia". You have to present a vision for how it will get us there.

I'm tired of hearing about how AI will solve all the worlds problems. I want to see actual progress towards achieving these goals. And for the most part that hasn't manifested. Most people would consider AI to have had a net negative impact on their lives.

[AngryData]

How? The biggest cost of most products comes down to energy cost and the profit margins of each proccess and middleman. Actual labor costs are already a pretty small portion of most products and even if you mine and smelt twice as much material per worker with AI somehow, that is at best a few percentage off the final price. And adding in AI processing isn't going to reduce energy costs or increases wages.