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by muldvarp 12 days ago
> so it's kind of annoying I'm not really going to see any upsides to an AI world either

I don't think the "permanent underclass" will see many upsides either. They certainly won't have the money to pay for it. I'm excluding myself in that statement because luckily I have access to large amounts of barbiturates.
1 comments
pfdietz 12 days ago
The math community was not a global underclass. World wealth is increasing, the actual global underclass is seeing rapidly improving lives.

You may be seeing a loss of privilege due at least in part to the inevitable reversion to the mean of US economic dominance. But on a global scale, things are going well. AI will lead to a much larger pie.

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muldvarp 12 days ago
> The math community was not a global underclass.

I never claimed they were. The term "permanent underclass" refers to the preferred world order of AI techbro billionaires[1] where human labour is worthless and in consequence normal people no longer have any leverage. Societies where most of the value is dug out of the ground and where human labour is comparatively worthless already exist and living there is not necessarily fun[2].

> World wealth is increasing, the actual global underclass is seeing rapidly improving lives.

The global underclass has been seeing improving lives well before LLMs were a thing. The question is whether they will _continue_ to see their lives improve if their labour is no longer required.

> You may be seeing a loss of privilege due at least in part to the inevitable reversion to the mean of US economic dominance.

I'm not from the US, I don't live in the US, and in fact I've never been to the US.

> AI will lead to a much larger pie.

Which will only benefit people if their piece of the pie doesn't shrink because they don't have any leverage. There is also more than one pie. The real estate pie for example won't grow, instead every piece of the pie will become even more expensive. Most people only own pieces of the pie that will decrease in value (human labour) not pieces of pies that will increase in value.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/ai-labor-work-for...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

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pfdietz 12 days ago
Why do you think tech bro billions aren't also subject to replacement by AI? They compete with each other, and if AI does their jobs better than they can themselves they are strongly incented to use AI.

Absent a world dictatorship there's always competition here. And fully superhuman AI eliminates the main objection to socialism, that you need markets with smart people to make an economy function. Full automated luxury communism (like Ian Banks) is a possible outcome.

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muldvarp 12 days ago
> Why do you think tech bro billions aren't also subject to replacement by AI?

Because they're billionaires. They don't actually work for a living. They own stuff for a living.

> And fully superhuman AI eliminates the main objection to socialism, that you need markets with smart people to make an economy function. Full automated luxury communism (like Ian Banks) is a possible outcome.

Luxury communism is also a possible outcome in countries with large oil reserves (Venezuela for example), it's just not a likely outcome because common people have no leverage and billionaires didn't become billionaires by giving stuff away.

Even if "fully automated luxury communism" were a likely outcome, the transition there would be very rough and would take years. If software engineering is automated away in 2028 it could still take years or decades before the first general purpose robot can take over plumbing. (Former) software engineers will have a rough transition.

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