[woeirua]

I believe that AI will continue to progress. I believe that we’re going to see a fast takeoff.

That said, some people are now discussing a “societal singularity” wherein society breaks before the actual emergence of AGI. I believe this is the trajectory we are on. The question is what happens to the unemployed. Democracies will not tolerate mass permanent unemployment, as we’ve seen over and over again.

UBI is a scam, many middle class folks would be worse off under UBI than they are under the current system. They will fight to defend the economic status quo.

In the end, I think capitalism is incompatible with the emergence of AGI, and I think an aligned ASI will smash the capitalist system simply out of pure egalitarianism. (Note: I was previously a proponent of capitalism.) I think many people will die trying to defend capitalism. We’re at the beginning of the AI wars.

[nervousvarun]

My sentiments are fairly similar.

In the US at least the middle class was already being hunted to extinction and it seems reasonable. This is just accelerant on that already burning fire.

[tim333]

The capitalist system is kind of a tool to provide prosperity by people making stuff and so remains because people like prosperity. If AI can make the stuff it may become redundant and fade in importance without needing to be smashed.

Like there was kind of an A B test of capitalism vs socialism in Germany but East Germany got less prosperity and so they had to build walls with machine guns to stop people escaping the socialist side. But if AI was providing abundance in the east that might not have been needed? Like in the future if you have two societies, one dysfunctional capitalism where Musk and Altman have everything and the other a kind of AI socialism where everyone has abundance of most things, people may voluntarily choose the later.