[xyzzy123]

> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.

Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.

Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.

> The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?

> If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.

This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.

[qsera]

>Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need..

How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?

>Who owns the robots though..

I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

[crabmusket]

> Isn't that the idea?

No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:

> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.

The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?

I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.

Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.

But that's still not "abundance for all".

[mjanx123]

> The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

Taxes are actually the means of how the government extracts work from the population. At the start of the circuit the government prints tokens and offers them for the things it wants done. At the end of the circuit the government demands to be handed tokens else prison. The value of the tokens only comes from it being the means to pay the artificial debt imposed on you.

Government: I want you to produce these weapons, and I offer you this bag of 1.5 trillion small metal discs Population: thank you but we are not into collecting small metal discs Government: on this day next year I will want a small metal disc from each of you and who will not give one will go to prison Population: how did you say we can get them?

A society that does not extract work from the population lacks the mechanism that gives the tokens the value. Nobody would be interested in being "paid" government tokens for maintaining the robots. Maintenance robots will maintain the robots.

Humans will not need to do anything and will just be having fun all the time. For some that means to be on the top/high in the hierarchy. That requires undermining others to get above them. The fun will be spoilt in some ways.

[ares623]

> How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?

If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?

> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

Taxes from what?

[qsera]

>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?

As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that.

>Taxes from what..

Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.

[shimman]

The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5].

All these programs poll above majorities in the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too.

If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people."

It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions.

Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)?

People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race.

[1] 65% https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-al...

[2] 82% https://www.ffyf.org/2026/01/28/new-national-poll-shows-stro...

[3] 60% https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/7/23863415/polls-support-un...

[4] 60% https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/11/democrats...

[5] 60 https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cwcp-job-guarantee-poll

[qsera]

>but you have to pay for the privilege too...

You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.

>now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it.

Tell me, how many elites have a nuclear weapon.

[shimman]

If you don't understand how elites have used the US military to strong arm their holdings throughout the world, IDK what to tell you. US imperialism is a real thing that has existed for the last 120+ years, it has also only benefited a small minority of rich Americans.

See the banana wars, see the US oil interests in the middle east. These are just two major examples.

Acting like the US won't do this again when the elites have captured the political apparatus is the foolish part, especially when this is the current operating procedure at the moment (protecting money over basic human rights).

[danaris]

> The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything.

Yes, but how it changes depends entirely on who owns the robots.

There is zero current evidence that benevolent governments will own the robots, and huge evidence that self-centered wealthy billionaires (and trillionaires!) will own them.

In such a case, the response to "the robots will make everything" isn't "so give it away to the people for free! :-)". It's "so what do I need all these stupid people for? make killbots to keep them away from my fully-automated luxury oligarchy compound!"

[casey2]

For all the other economic activities that robots don't run? 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.

As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.

[fakedang]

> 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked.

X for doubt. When automation entered agriculture, we started producing way more for way less. Agriculture stopped becoming a significant part for most developed economies in terms of both GDP contribution and employment.

> All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.

X. The people who lose jobs rarely find something anew - they'll simply become part of an expanding labour pool, further depressing wages. All while some numpty politician would be telling them they need to stop farming and start learning how to code (never mind there's absolutely no point in doing that either).

> As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.

A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.

[stephc_int13]

It is never really “for free”.

It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work.

They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.

No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.

[qsera]

>They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.

But just like humans can help each other, robots could help each other too. This includes digging up various resources, finding means of power generation etc..

[stephc_int13]

Otherwise you could say that humans are working for free as well, as they can cultivate their own food and even build themselves by making babies.

[stephc_int13]

Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.

[qsera]

By free, I mean "free of human effort"

[stephc_int13]

If you own a factory, what you see is a big box with input and output, human labor is just an annoying variable, removing it won't turn the entire thing "free".

The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.

[danaris]

Energy has become nearly free, though, as the space- and cost-efficiency of solar skyrockets. That's really not the problem here.

[mordae]

> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

Governments are no longer allowed to print money. Do you think they will be allowed to build unlimited supply of robots? You are funny.

All the robot factories will belong to rich and we will have to _beg_ to have some measly allocation _while_ we feed the police that prevents us from just taking them.

And politicians will mostly just say this is _inevitable_ for some reason or other.

[qsera]

But then why hasn't governments and the rich already collaborated converted all of us plebs into slaves?

If that has not happened already then why do you think so pessimistically?

[markdown]

The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.

[imtringued]

>Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.

If you permit me to reference the blog post:

>It is a well attested fact that human logic is far from flawless. We are all victims of our biases, emotions, and equally importantly, our implicit assumptions. Just like in mathematics, where all our theorems stem from sets of axioms, so do our beliefs stem from assumptions. But unlike in mathematics, where the axioms are concrete, explicit, and shaped by natural observations, the human logic's axioms are more abstract, implicit, and shaped by our knowledge and our cultural background.

You're making an implicit assumption that all land is owned by people who want to deprive you of the land and its products. You can't make the argument that a "rich person" is holding onto the land and eating all of the food produced by it, so it would be unfair for the "rich person" to give you access to the food.

The underlying problem here is access to land and this is an independent concern from "The Economy".

>Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.

Ok so you mentioned it, but this means we are no longer talking about the machines. In fact the presence or absence of machines is a completely irrelevant factor here. If you can get your hands on the machines, it turns into a non issue.

And as mentioned above, if you are exclusively producing for yourself, you don't need that much land, hence the people without land are in the right if they demand to get some of it. The very argument you made is that the people with the machines are better stewards of the land, but this logic only makes sense in the presence of them producing for an outside consumer. If they just hold onto the land and do nothing with it, their hypothetical productivity increase is worth nothing compared to the very real zero yield they produce by doing nothing. Even an inefficient production process has higher absolute productivity than doing nothing.

Take it one step further. From the perspective of the low productivity producers the land is very valuable and from the perspective of the high productivity autark producer, the land is worth very little. If the autark producer wants to role play a feudalist and puts an army of killer robots there, he would be expending a lot of resources for something that the producer doesn't consider valuable. Since the low productivity producers consider the land more valuable, their military budget per acre is actually higher.

So now the second underlying assumption is that the landless people are defeated by the robot army of the landed people. I hope you see where this is going. It's not about economics at this point anymore. It's some weird power fantasy where some group of people always wins and another group of people always loses.