The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face.
If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed.
Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans who needed to eat and pay rent, so I've never had to worry about the labor price floor too much.
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction.
> This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
What if I consider the labor conditions that exist after this transformation to be undignified?
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
In general, yes. For many groups, no.
It assumes that there is something of value for them to do and as shown by masses of long term unemployed in many areas, that is not always the case.
For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. Because of various limitations, there is nothing for them to do in many cases. The market should have corrected this (especially over the long term) if reconstitution was consistently possible.
If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart.
There is also a large portion of the population on social assistance so while there are things they can do, the market value of what they can do is often well below their needs.
The post industrial revolution jobs market from 1880-1940s was pretty crappy for labor, and we have no idea how things turned out for the average displaced workers. We do know that there were whole sections of towns called skid rows, we know that there were flop houses. We know huge sections of men lived in boarding homes, and women stayed living with their parents. We've read things like Steinbeck and get a glimpse of the life of desperation at the time.
Don't let people fool you that the labor market will look like post WW2 America. It will look like 1880-1940s, during which there were huge labor fights and things were so bad there were 2 world wars.
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is.
It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it solely because they have very little better choice.
Furthermore, this power inequality directly translates to influence over economic output of our civilization - by the time value of human menial or cognitive labor goes low enough to delete jobs, all that will be left will be various equivalents of being a sugar baby for the rich - fulfilling their emotional, sexual, and social needs. Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.
> Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
The middle class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population nowadays. Even among those working high-earning jobs like tech/healthcare/finance, most are just upper worker class.
And it isn't like people can't do still everything they could do yesterday. There are just more and better options. Economically AI is no particular threat to the median human and even knowledge workers are still going to have fine lives. Maybe not as knowledge workers.
The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But robotics will take a long time to get there even in an optimistic case. Labour will still have value for a long time to come.
Let's say a truck driver's job gets fully automated by self-driving trucks. How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new? #learntocode? How about SW developers? What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?
This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this.
It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
> This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable.
Except that’s already happening. Through social media being engineered to be additive, advertising and user data collection being used to manipulate voters, AI bosses proudly claiming they’re putting people out of work, and games companies paying on the weak with loot boxes and other massively overpriced in game transactions.
And why isn’t there any legislation against these predatory tactics? Because big tech also donate millions to the very people we elect and who are supposed to serve the citizens.
And that’s without discussing the indirect costs of big tech from data centres ruining the lives of local residents, to independent stores getting screwed by knockoffs from Amazon and cheap Chinese stores.
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
That’s a pretty weak counterpoint. In fact it’s basically what we call an “ad hominem attack”. What you’re doing is arguing about the individual rather than discussing their points directly.
It’s like saying “you can’t be worried about climate change because you own a car.”
> It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
If you think there is legitimate worry the you should take their points seriously. It would be contradictory to do otherwise
Inevitably? Maybe not, but the situation isn't gonna get better by saying "oh I'm sure the tech industry will do a 180 and stop making everything worse"
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
There's this meme where person A says "we should improve society somewhat", and B replies "yet you participate in society! curious". Very similar argument.
I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives.
From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.
Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.
To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.
Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.
If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.
Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.
We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about now). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and the social fabric at large. Reject "disruption." Don't take money to make your life worse. That sort of thing.
Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term.
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
This is a real threat that is not discussed enough. If labor could be completely automated, then the value and political power of workers tends to zero.
I feel like the people who post this sentiment have never done any plumbing, electrical wiring or really just any sort of actual creative manual labor.
Show me the robot that can plumb a new sink in, or brick up an old doorway... Because I'd really like to buy it, those things are hard and time consuming!
capitalism has always moved in the direction of automation, yielding booming progress and prosperity for much of mankind. the technological comforts we have today far exceed those of a thousand years ago, no one can dispute. but at some point, if there are no more jobs due to "full automation" then the promise of capitalism bringing most people out of poverty will start to fall short. it's a real question, what do we do then? short of adapting, as we always have, i don't see any viable alternatives. OP recommending not playing at all is peak derangement divorced from reality imo
Maybe the real maker economy will be the future underclass building makeshift infrastructure to support a subsistence lifestyle in small post capital communities off the grid once big capital no longer feels the need to maintain a consumer economy at any scale.
I don't know what the future holds, but owning a few acres in rural nowhere and knowing how to build stuff gives me a sense of security.
Someone needs to find a way to turn dirt into a 3d printing material.
Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
Thanks for posting the article, it's really well written and worth reading! I think he raises some important points in the `“Possible” doesn’t mean “guaranteed”` section.
His argument is based on comparative advantage, and he says
"The key difference here is that everyone — every single person, every single AI, everyone — always has a comparative advantage at something!".
This is why everyone in the world has a job and a decent salary today, just as humanity will in the future(!!). In reality it is not like this, and he talks about some of the reasons for this in the above mentioned paragraph.
I also disagree massively with his discounting of the scenario where energy gets relocated to AI instead of food production. He paints that as unlikely, while I think it is almost inevitable. I don't necessarily think it will happen in one fell swoop with force, but it can definitely happen over a generation through pure market forces. The owners of AI just have more money, and will use this to buy energy. Cost of food will rise compared to the value of labour, aka cost of living will rise, and it will be harder and harder to sustain a family. Since we somehow think that taxing wealth is absurd, we will keep taxing labour.
It seems to me that he tries to wave away the fact that if AI becomes much more productive than humans in everything, then economy predicts that it will be allocated the energy, not humans. And he waves this away with 'politics will save us', which I find unlikely.
I think it's pretty clear that if automation gets to the point where machines can do the difficult tasks, like repairing a sewer or managing a farm, then the entire human workforce is no longer needed.
It's difficult to see where it might head that doesn't lead to population collapse and some form of dystopia.
> Have you considered not participating? If you participate, we all lose. We will either all be in the underclass together or not.
This has been suggested a bunch of times in the comments of HN as well as on other social media, but what exactly would that look like?
As this seems like the ultimate prisoner dilemma and the winning solution there is always be first to make a deal, even if we accept the premise of AI turning us all into an underclass (a prediction often made with revolutionary technology I might add).
This is incredibly naive. Not participating is not the solution, unless everybody stops participating at the same time. If only you stop participating, you will be marginalized now instead of later. It's a prisoner's dilemma, only against billions of people.
There are many things that can happen before we're all enslaved by AGI. It might well not happen. We might enter a war, or a cycle of civil wars that change society in a way we can't predict. Or, most probably, some jobs will disappear, some others will become available and AI will be a commodity. Just as machines did after the Industrial Revolution.
It's extremely hard predicting the future. Telling people to "stop participating" (how? By quitting their job? By fighting the class war?) is a bit irresponsible.
Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass.
Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
I would recommend moving to a country that is less susceptible to this threat.
I left the UK for this reason and live very comfortably on around £15k. I rent a city centre flat with 600 megabit fibre and really good amenities. I have time and space to build what I want.
"Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." - Archimedes.
Unfortunately in the UK it's really hard to survive, let alone actually have time to do anything meaningful. I don't know if it's engineered by big tech/property/finance or some other demon. Maybe the monster in qntm's "There is no Anitmemetics Division" is allegorical.
> GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have, [...] or lobbying your government to take it from you.
I find it quite interesting, and somewhat disturbing, that we've so quickly come to the point of seeing the AI power drivers as openly adversarial to people and deeply entangled with equally adversarial government forces.
But are we actually (and realistically) talking about technofeudalism in the next couple of decades?
George Hotz’s post-capitalist decoherence wasn’t in my 2026 bingo card.
I wonder if he came up with this view before or after working for big tech in different capacities and using Gmail.
He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.
I think the article is mixing together multiple things while at the same time having an underlying bedrock of truth. The system as it stands is not viable and people need to rebel at least in how they vote but I don't think AI is the real issue here.
The system is flawed for different reasons. Tolerance for high vertical integration and oligopolies have seriously damaged the efficiency of the market and limited people's ability to disrupt. Capital concentration has created a new form of aristocracy. They have successfully lobbied to significantly weaken the mechanisms supposed to spread this money, notably inheritance tax. The Supreme Court has significantly altered how democracy functions by lifting limits on fundings and given far too much power to the richest.
The last forty years have basically torn down all the foundations Tocqueville saw as fundamental to the success of the young USA. People should fight to get things back on track.
AI is mostly incidental in that. It doesn't matter if AI temporary concentrates some wealth if the mechanisms for it to then be spread again are in place.
It is, on hacker news, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism it seems.
This is echoing a term made by Varoufakis about an increasing amount of money being held by a smaller and smaller group, not a return to literal peasant existence. It’s not feudalism, it’s ‘neo-feudalism’.
The argument that labour can move is true, except where it can’t. Look at the entire towns of miners made irrelevant with no replacement to their jobs. Sure you might say they can move half way across the country to clean toilets but they have skills, a family and houses somewhere else.
Where the argument of a feudal analogy really rings true is the increasing attempt to do back to extraction of rent for everything. Subscriptions for everything, including homes are becoming more and more normal. Are we really okay with a world in this form?
I get the feeling behind the anti-AI sentiment, I just disagree with the conclusions.
There’s a lot of fear around what will happen with AI, not so much of extinction but rather of two things: fear of losing income, and arguably more importantly, fear of losing identity.
People often are invested in what they do to the point that it’s who they are. That being replaced or eliminated might be a bigger psychological threat than lack of income, at least to those of us fortunate enough to be well off right now.
However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.
The real problem is the transition, it’s such a huge shift, and it will happen all at once to everyone, uprooting our idea of the world and our place in it.
What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.
For me this looks like the following: companies must commit to retaining some minimum number of employees in every currently existing function, to be determined proportional to their profit taking. This sets a floor on the job losses that can come later when AI really comes on stream.
The justification for this is three fold: firstly, it’s a safety mechanism, it ensures that regardless of the capabilities of an AI system, there are multiple humans working with it to verify its results. If they aren’t verifying diligently, then they’re not doing their jobs.
Secondly, jobs aren’t just a way of making income, they’re wrapped up in identity and meaning for at least some people, and this helps to maintain that existing identity structure across a meaningful cross section of society.
Third, it keeps the economy running, money circulating. You can’t have a market economy without consumers. UBI is one component of this too, but this is both more direct, more useful and more meaningful.
> However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.
Benefits come to those who have the means to access it, and wealth is a measure of the ability to direct and influence human effort and society.
How exactly do you propose that AI will serve the wellbeing of the worker/middle classes after they've been made obsolete by it?
Goodwill of the corporations working on them? Of their shareholders, well-known to always put welfare first and profit second? Government action increasingly directed by their lobbying?
> What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.
Sure. How? We've not done it with any other technological advances so far, and I don't see how shifting the power balance further away from the worker/middle class will help matters.
There's a reason why the era of techno-optimism has already faded as quickly as it's begun.
To me it is less the fear of losing identity and income.
These can be figured out if the system allows for it.
But if the system will not allow for it, for example if we loose our Democratic system along the line, all bets are off.
[+] [-] mmaunder|2 months ago|reply
This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
[+] [-] mitthrowaway2|2 months ago|reply
If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed.
Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans who needed to eat and pay rent, so I've never had to worry about the labor price floor too much.
[+] [-] lurk2|2 months ago|reply
We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction.
> This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
What if I consider the labor conditions that exist after this transformation to be undignified?
[+] [-] MattGaiser|2 months ago|reply
In general, yes. For many groups, no.
It assumes that there is something of value for them to do and as shown by masses of long term unemployed in many areas, that is not always the case.
For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. Because of various limitations, there is nothing for them to do in many cases. The market should have corrected this (especially over the long term) if reconstitution was consistently possible.
If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart.
There is also a large portion of the population on social assistance so while there are things they can do, the market value of what they can do is often well below their needs.
[+] [-] _DeadFred_|2 months ago|reply
The post industrial revolution jobs market from 1880-1940s was pretty crappy for labor, and we have no idea how things turned out for the average displaced workers. We do know that there were whole sections of towns called skid rows, we know that there were flop houses. We know huge sections of men lived in boarding homes, and women stayed living with their parents. We've read things like Steinbeck and get a glimpse of the life of desperation at the time.
Don't let people fool you that the labor market will look like post WW2 America. It will look like 1880-1940s, during which there were huge labor fights and things were so bad there were 2 world wars.
[+] [-] Llamamoe|2 months ago|reply
Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is.
It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it solely because they have very little better choice.
Furthermore, this power inequality directly translates to influence over economic output of our civilization - by the time value of human menial or cognitive labor goes low enough to delete jobs, all that will be left will be various equivalents of being a sugar baby for the rich - fulfilling their emotional, sexual, and social needs. Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.
> Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
The middle class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population nowadays. Even among those working high-earning jobs like tech/healthcare/finance, most are just upper worker class.
[+] [-] roenxi|2 months ago|reply
The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But robotics will take a long time to get there even in an optimistic case. Labour will still have value for a long time to come.
[+] [-] WithinReason|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vaughands|2 months ago|reply
It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
[+] [-] HotGarbage|2 months ago|reply
By working for them you are enabling this.
[+] [-] hnlmorg|2 months ago|reply
Except that’s already happening. Through social media being engineered to be additive, advertising and user data collection being used to manipulate voters, AI bosses proudly claiming they’re putting people out of work, and games companies paying on the weak with loot boxes and other massively overpriced in game transactions.
And why isn’t there any legislation against these predatory tactics? Because big tech also donate millions to the very people we elect and who are supposed to serve the citizens.
And that’s without discussing the indirect costs of big tech from data centres ruining the lives of local residents, to independent stores getting screwed by knockoffs from Amazon and cheap Chinese stores.
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
That’s a pretty weak counterpoint. In fact it’s basically what we call an “ad hominem attack”. What you’re doing is arguing about the individual rather than discussing their points directly.
It’s like saying “you can’t be worried about climate change because you own a car.”
> It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
If you think there is legitimate worry the you should take their points seriously. It would be contradictory to do otherwise
[+] [-] Llamamoe|2 months ago|reply
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
There's this meme where person A says "we should improve society somewhat", and B replies "yet you participate in society! curious". Very similar argument.
[+] [-] duskdozer|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kaliqt|2 months ago|reply
The good ol' AGI and then ASI singularity everyone likes to talk about. To be fair, it is possible.
[+] [-] Sverigevader|2 months ago|reply
This means, work somewhere else, or even _do_ something else.
[+] [-] 1dom|2 months ago|reply
From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.
Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.
To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.
Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.
If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.
Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.
[+] [-] pharrington|2 months ago|reply
There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and the social fabric at large. Reject "disruption." Don't take money to make your life worse. That sort of thing.
[+] [-] imiric|2 months ago|reply
"Will"? If you don't see how this is happening today, you're either a part of the problem, or blissfully ignorant.
> It offers no constructive alternative
WDYM? The article clearly suggests that people should stop working for these companies.
Besides, why must every criticism propose a solution? The problem should be fixed by those who created it.
[+] [-] unknown|2 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] obsoleetorr|2 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] phyzix5761|2 months ago|reply
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
[+] [-] pu_pe|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] uh_uh|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|2 months ago|reply
Show me the robot that can plumb a new sink in, or brick up an old doorway... Because I'd really like to buy it, those things are hard and time consuming!
[+] [-] obsoleetorr|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] shomp|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jswelker|2 months ago|reply
I don't know what the future holds, but owning a few acres in rural nowhere and knowing how to build stuff gives me a sense of security.
Someone needs to find a way to turn dirt into a 3d printing material.
[+] [-] kranke155|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] energy123|2 months ago|reply
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-...
Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
[+] [-] Epa095|2 months ago|reply
His argument is based on comparative advantage, and he says
"The key difference here is that everyone — every single person, every single AI, everyone — always has a comparative advantage at something!".
This is why everyone in the world has a job and a decent salary today, just as humanity will in the future(!!). In reality it is not like this, and he talks about some of the reasons for this in the above mentioned paragraph.
I also disagree massively with his discounting of the scenario where energy gets relocated to AI instead of food production. He paints that as unlikely, while I think it is almost inevitable. I don't necessarily think it will happen in one fell swoop with force, but it can definitely happen over a generation through pure market forces. The owners of AI just have more money, and will use this to buy energy. Cost of food will rise compared to the value of labour, aka cost of living will rise, and it will be harder and harder to sustain a family. Since we somehow think that taxing wealth is absurd, we will keep taxing labour.
It seems to me that he tries to wave away the fact that if AI becomes much more productive than humans in everything, then economy predicts that it will be allocated the energy, not humans. And he waves this away with 'politics will save us', which I find unlikely.
[+] [-] redox99|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] momodotee|2 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CrzyLngPwd|2 months ago|reply
It's difficult to see where it might head that doesn't lead to population collapse and some form of dystopia.
[+] [-] awakeasleep|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|2 months ago|reply
This has been suggested a bunch of times in the comments of HN as well as on other social media, but what exactly would that look like?
As this seems like the ultimate prisoner dilemma and the winning solution there is always be first to make a deal, even if we accept the premise of AI turning us all into an underclass (a prediction often made with revolutionary technology I might add).
[+] [-] procaryote|2 months ago|reply
A: participate and have a chance to not be part of a perpetual underclass
B: for moral reasons, don't participate, be part of the underclass
I kinda would have hoped for
C: <something> to stop this from happening
Otherwise it's the worst sales-pitch ever
[+] [-] forthwall|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] barrenko|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] curtisblaine|2 months ago|reply
There are many things that can happen before we're all enslaved by AGI. It might well not happen. We might enter a war, or a cycle of civil wars that change society in a way we can't predict. Or, most probably, some jobs will disappear, some others will become available and AI will be a commodity. Just as machines did after the Industrial Revolution. It's extremely hard predicting the future. Telling people to "stop participating" (how? By quitting their job? By fighting the class war?) is a bit irresponsible.
[+] [-] pizlonator|2 months ago|reply
Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
[+] [-] willtemperley|2 months ago|reply
I left the UK for this reason and live very comfortably on around £15k. I rent a city centre flat with 600 megabit fibre and really good amenities. I have time and space to build what I want.
"Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." - Archimedes.
Unfortunately in the UK it's really hard to survive, let alone actually have time to do anything meaningful. I don't know if it's engineered by big tech/property/finance or some other demon. Maybe the monster in qntm's "There is no Anitmemetics Division" is allegorical.
[+] [-] GardenLetter27|2 months ago|reply
That said, the real point is paying off your mortgage (or getting fixed low interest). With no mortgage I could almost live on that little in Sweden.
[+] [-] MonkeyClub|2 months ago|reply
I find it quite interesting, and somewhat disturbing, that we've so quickly come to the point of seeing the AI power drivers as openly adversarial to people and deeply entangled with equally adversarial government forces.
But are we actually (and realistically) talking about technofeudalism in the next couple of decades?
[+] [-] camillomiller|2 months ago|reply
He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.
[+] [-] StopDisinfo910|2 months ago|reply
The system is flawed for different reasons. Tolerance for high vertical integration and oligopolies have seriously damaged the efficiency of the market and limited people's ability to disrupt. Capital concentration has created a new form of aristocracy. They have successfully lobbied to significantly weaken the mechanisms supposed to spread this money, notably inheritance tax. The Supreme Court has significantly altered how democracy functions by lifting limits on fundings and given far too much power to the richest.
The last forty years have basically torn down all the foundations Tocqueville saw as fundamental to the success of the young USA. People should fight to get things back on track.
AI is mostly incidental in that. It doesn't matter if AI temporary concentrates some wealth if the mechanisms for it to then be spread again are in place.
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|2 months ago|reply
Because it'd be nice for rent to not cost 80% of my part time income and spending hours just looking for full time work.
>Have you considered not participating?
Sure, but tech is too full of hyoerindividualist egos to collectively bargain. We'll burn the world down before we come to that point.
[+] [-] iNerdier|2 months ago|reply
This is echoing a term made by Varoufakis about an increasing amount of money being held by a smaller and smaller group, not a return to literal peasant existence. It’s not feudalism, it’s ‘neo-feudalism’.
The argument that labour can move is true, except where it can’t. Look at the entire towns of miners made irrelevant with no replacement to their jobs. Sure you might say they can move half way across the country to clean toilets but they have skills, a family and houses somewhere else.
Where the argument of a feudal analogy really rings true is the increasing attempt to do back to extraction of rent for everything. Subscriptions for everything, including homes are becoming more and more normal. Are we really okay with a world in this form?
[+] [-] Chance-Device|2 months ago|reply
There’s a lot of fear around what will happen with AI, not so much of extinction but rather of two things: fear of losing income, and arguably more importantly, fear of losing identity.
People often are invested in what they do to the point that it’s who they are. That being replaced or eliminated might be a bigger psychological threat than lack of income, at least to those of us fortunate enough to be well off right now.
However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.
The real problem is the transition, it’s such a huge shift, and it will happen all at once to everyone, uprooting our idea of the world and our place in it.
What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.
For me this looks like the following: companies must commit to retaining some minimum number of employees in every currently existing function, to be determined proportional to their profit taking. This sets a floor on the job losses that can come later when AI really comes on stream.
The justification for this is three fold: firstly, it’s a safety mechanism, it ensures that regardless of the capabilities of an AI system, there are multiple humans working with it to verify its results. If they aren’t verifying diligently, then they’re not doing their jobs.
Secondly, jobs aren’t just a way of making income, they’re wrapped up in identity and meaning for at least some people, and this helps to maintain that existing identity structure across a meaningful cross section of society.
Third, it keeps the economy running, money circulating. You can’t have a market economy without consumers. UBI is one component of this too, but this is both more direct, more useful and more meaningful.
[+] [-] Llamamoe|2 months ago|reply
Benefits come to those who have the means to access it, and wealth is a measure of the ability to direct and influence human effort and society.
How exactly do you propose that AI will serve the wellbeing of the worker/middle classes after they've been made obsolete by it?
Goodwill of the corporations working on them? Of their shareholders, well-known to always put welfare first and profit second? Government action increasingly directed by their lobbying?
> What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.
Sure. How? We've not done it with any other technological advances so far, and I don't see how shifting the power balance further away from the worker/middle class will help matters.
There's a reason why the era of techno-optimism has already faded as quickly as it's begun.
[+] [-] inatreecrown2|2 months ago|reply