[thinkingkong]

We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living.

We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.

[elevatortrim]

Exactly. And this is why ideas like post-scarcity or universal-high-income are not realistic. Because we can already make life heaven on earth for everyone alive. But we won't. Not because we do not have the resources or means of production, but because we do not have the willingness and systems in place. If we do not fix these first, AI-abundance will bring more suffering, not more prosperity.

We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.

[malfist]

Something that drove this home to me is that there is more vacant housing than there are unhoused people in the US. We could solve homelessness tomorrow, but we'd rather confiscate their camping equipment and throw them in prison than help. And I'm sure someone will be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am and what about mental illness and drug use. As if those people don't deserve our compassion too.

[selectodude]

Are you going to be the one to round up all the homeless people and ship them off to abandoned houses in Appalachia?

[ropetin]

Admittedly this is a few years old: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/61000-homes-are-empty-in...

61,000 empty houses in San Francisco, 10,000 unhoused people. Even if the unhoused population is under reported by an order of magnitude, there is more than enough housing available to house everyone where they currently are.

[selectodude]

I mean, if we’re going to expropriate real estate then that’s a different discussion.

[malfist]

No, that is literally this discussion.

[tuatoru]

Nurse Ratched was not a sufficient argument for ceasing to protect the mentally ill from themselves, it turns out.

[Andrex]

The true horrific realization I had with Colossus: The Forbin Project was how equally scared and accepting of the AI's message I was.

"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."

"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."

The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?

[fennec-posix]

This, 100%

[jamiequint]

And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history. It's almost as if the system is working.

[elevatortrim]

I just had chatgpt draw a table of wealth distribution by year based on best data sources it can find.

It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.

What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.

Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0b9a2a-4c6c-8394-8a66-7f86c510c8...

[jamiequint]

Yes, envy is a bitch.

There being more $10+ billionaires doesn't make your life worse when you are earning 50% more on a real dollar basis than you would have been 50 years ago.

[windexh8er]

Spoken like a true partner of a capital management firm! Making money off of money. What a productive part of society as a whole.

[coldtea]

>And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history

Nope, many things are worse than the past 3-4 decades and getting worse still. Especially precious things like access to jobs and good-job-qualyfing education and healthcare and housing and food.

And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...

[enochthered]

Things aren’t perfect therefore they’re terrible.

[paulhebert]

Things aren’t terrible therefore they’re perfect

[luke5441]

We cannot all live like Americans because we do not have enough crude oil -- even not taking into account the consequences for the climate.

So given there are constraints, resources must be rationed/allocated somehow.

Maybe we now have the technologies to remove this resource constraint. We'll see.