> This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need
We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long time ago. No matter how much we have humans always want more. AI won't change that.
We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long time ago. No matter how much we have humans always want more. AI won't change that.
I don't think it's correct to say that we had enough wealth a long time ago. There are a lot of places in the world that are still desperately poor by any measure, not just by the standards of the wealthy. And although it's undoubtedly true that the wealthiest few deciles could give up many luxuries to provide more for the poor, it's much more arguable if there is enough for everyone to have enough without generating much more.
Food is all you really need. For luxury: food, sex, and purpose. The tribes have all 3.
This is obviously not true, since in every capitalist society, the hardest working people already make the least amount of money, and the laziest people employed already get given the most amount of money.
Capitalism has already proven that financial incentive has no correlation to how hard someone works.
Your example is evidence of my statement, not refutation.
I don't think so.
And yet I am paid 5-10X what they are.
If you got the same pay whether or not you showed up to work each day, you'd be less incentivized to show up.
I don't remember from school the bit where Mr Socialism said "let the workers sieze the means of production so they can shutdown the means of production, because they are lazy and stupid". "define:Socialism"[1] - "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively". NB. that it involves production, and is /not/ "Systems of social organization in which lazy people get paid for doing nothing".
> "If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work"
Have you never seen or heard of volunteers? There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define%3Asocialism&ia=definition
Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons.
> There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?
You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is. If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.
Guys please stop deciding you want to be upset about a comment and then trying to backsolve your rationale.
Yes, and that disproves your claim that people only work for money, and without more money people won't do more work.
> "You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is." If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.*"
Volunteers earn no extra money for their work, and yet still work. Many people work unpaid overtime out of loyalty for their employer / coworkers / customers / patients, many people work out of passion and interest and hobbying ("starving artist" trope).
And, again, you're propagandising "Socialism" changing from "people get money without working" to "people can't get more than a fixed limited return on their work", which again it isn't. But let's go with that definition - if everything collectively owned, the more stuff there is the more stuff is collectively owned, so the more benefit everyone gets. When the Federal Government builds more roads, you personally get more roads you can drive on as a benefit. So even if Socialism was "you can't earn more than the minimum wage {because the collective takes it from you!}", you are part of the collective, so it still wouldn't be the case that people got no more benefit for producing more, as you claim.
That still leaves you with $10.800. A liability insurance costs here around 50–100€ per year for a family. What more insurances do you need? GDP per capita also includes pensioners, so you do not need to count pension into this.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...
There is a lot of hubris in saying we’re pretty much maxed out now, thanks and time to stop. I’d suggest instead we need to make smart choices, and that usually smart answers are not found at the far extremities. This “we have all we need” bit reminds me of scientists saying physics was over in the 19th century, combined with a bit of Thomas Malthus in such a way that we all die unless we halt innovation. It reminds me of that, but I’d be overstepping to put those words in your mouth. After all human intention has endless range to match the rest.
After a certain point that's true but I think you miss the point of the parent. There are many, many hungry people in the world, many people without shelter and further millions who have no access to healthcare education or even clean water. These are not subjective needs.
Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide health care and education for each and every one of them.
I don’t think this is really true, part of the problem is that the wealth that you think could be allocated to this problem was only generated by incentivizing people to build it with compensation, if you turned around and took it away from the people who built it and gave it to people who did not build it, you would disincentivize creation of more wealth, and the wealth you reappropriated would deteriorate, because you neglected to create an incentive and maintenance infrastructure to keep it working. This is exactly what happened when we tried this, starting with poor people in our own communities.
Public housing projects and welfare programs are money sinks that are notoriously counterproductive at meeting their stated needs; and we can’t get people to consider the structural imbalances that result because the need for these programs is an article of faith and among the believers the only acceptable reasons for their failure are “people who don’t agree with the program” and “lack of funding.”
Take a look at just about any book on consumerism
Obviously that's the extreme case, and the question is how close to universal replicators do you need to come before people can't want more things fast enough.
I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded.
I kind of am? Besides, people don't need to never be stupid again, they just need to become stupider at a slower rate than productivity increases. If hour by hour production significantly increased, how could people possibly waste enough?
More importantly, would they? We waste resources to signal wealth. Wasting an ever greater proportion of your allocated geyser of materials doesn't signal anything.
We'll probably reach technological self-replication singularity before AGI. I envision a small self replicating/repairing/transforming factory that could function based on local resources. Mostly 3d-printers, robots and tools for making tools.
But I think in reality there will be limited resources, energy and pollution we can all use, so we can't have our exponential utopia. Technology will be more like biology, and it will get good at recycling anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21
>> The "Netsphere", a sort of computerized control network for The City. The City is an immense volume of artificial structure, separated into massive "floors" by nearly-impenetrable barriers known as "Megastructure". The City is inhabited by scattered human and transhuman tribes as well as hostile cyborgs known as Silicon Creatures. The Net Terminal Genes appear to be the key to halting the unhindered, chaotic expansion of the Megastructure, as well as a way of stopping the murderous robot horde known as the Safeguard from destroying all of humanity.
For anyone curious: https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/compel-vs-impel...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)
Modern, first-world society does seem to be reaching some sort of inflection point that might point to a "top" (of physical consumption at least) as we get more efficient and more stuff is moving digital. That's not to say there is really anything conclusive, but it is interesting to think about.
If there is a natural (not physical out of resources) limit where humans feel satiated i doubt we're anywhere near it. If we do hit it, wait a bunch of generations and they'll be more humans.
If there is, it's somewhere beyond launching sports cars into orbit.
While he and many others could buy personal space launches, that launch is not a demonstration of such. He wasn't paying for it, and it wasn't for him.
I think it's more "vying for the 'richest person on earth' title" that's important here.
My conclusion: individual satisfaction is bounded, as long as we have bounded brains. First I should mention that the best principle I've found to underlie life is that we should maximize or optimize some kind of experience of consciousness, for every conscious entity. It's hard to define precisely what that entails, but we have quite good intuition: your life should be rich in activity, in interaction with others, in learning, in thought, in seeing, hearing, thinking; of course, not so rich as to be overwhelming and collapse the whole thing or leave us unable to digest or grasp or understand (at least a part of) what we're experiencing. I don't claim to be completely original: Wilheim von Humboldt for me is one of the great thinkers of conscious motivation (he lived in the 18th century).
"I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves." -- WvH
Being clear: what matters is not the experiences themselves, i.e. the input/output, but what the various consciousness apprehend. What goes on in your brain. It doesn't matter you're at the most beautiful beach in the most beautiful sunset behaving joyfully and peacefully if internally you're depressed or in despair.
"The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." -- WvH
You can only make an individual so complete, so harmonious with itself. Our brains have about 100 billion neurons, i.e. a finite number, and there's only so much you can activate those connections. Really the goal is not with any single individual -- our goal should be with every conscious being. That's why we should not plan individually, we should plan as a society. A billionaire can only get so happy -- he can keep linearly stacking jet skis and race cars and yatchs but his happiness won't follow (linearly). We should realize we are all part of a society, as a whole, and ideally be completely indifferent among individuals (i.e. everyone deserves as much happiness as we can collectively get them).
In other words, we should take the Golden Rule literally. (of course, in practice, not everyone can be responsible for every other individual, but it should be our ultimate guiding principle, really, as individuals and society, unmistakably): every conscious being has the same value to yourself as yourself.
Because individual satisfaction is bounded, this allows maximizing the practically unbounded (because of almost unbounded entity numbers) satisfaction of society as a whole, currently about 8 billion individuals. We need to move past egoism. I don't think an egoistical civilization, as was Western Society for much of the 20th century, can reliably go much further than we've come (see: climate change, rising political instability, fluctuating inequality, stagnating quality of life).
I'm not arguing for any political system, I'm arguing for a cultural-social-technological outlook of the entire society. I'd label it 'Universalism' (but that's taken), so perhaps 'Conscious Universalism', or 'Concious value universalism'.
That's how we move our entire civilization forward, achieve better political stability, how we're able to tackle mega projects like engineering the climate and rethinking our global supply chain, how we can allocate massive resources to space exploration, space colonization, prevention of extinction events (like asteroid impacts, etc.), how we move definitely past threat of nuclear annihilation (a nuclear conflict, still not completely out of imagination, could perhaps still collapse society).
How to do it? I think part of it is simply enlightenment, discussion, writing and reading; the other is indeed recreating our institutions, including our economic and political systems (focused around this goal).
This century is when we decide whether we become the Borg or the Federation. Cylon or Human. Dalek or Doctor. (or just slowly collapse... hopefully not; we have potential)
To be clear, by conscious experience I don't mean just pleasure (or even just "happiness", just joy). Experience is much more complicated than pleasure alone, or any single feeling -- although of course generally they are good proxies in most situations (if you're happy it's usually, but not as a law, having good experiences).
I'll leave it as a reflection to the reader exactly what it entails -- with Humboldt's observation in mind (of "harmonious development [...] to a complete and consistent whole).
Another important observation to be had, is that we should have freedom to chose, in a way, what gives us pleasure, what's engrossing to us -- guided by reason. I call this concept 'freedom of utility' -- sure, we (generally) enjoy physically food, sex, and various other things (sometimes drugs that destroy our bodies and our minds); but what should we like? Imagine our intuitive tastes could be aligned to changes since we've developed millions of years ago, living in totally different environments under new light of reasoning, and new understanding of the universe.
And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since everything is very efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor humans.
You can quickly approach a situation where time is the limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don’t really have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good example: he’s got a few projects that he really cares about and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented than he is.
And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage and negative externalities on others that can wind you up like Marie-Antoinette.
Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren’t minimalists.
Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously.
What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do?
How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring.
> "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?"
OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life?
Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?
See what a pointless status grab it is? If it's outside all possible knowledge, it may as well be lies (it's not though). You can play Elite: Dangerous if you want a galaxy full of combat, and it's happening right now and better than the rest of the Milky Way there are actual players and ships and things and not silent void. The main lesson I took away from Elite Dangerous is that the Galactic PowerPlay between all the major factions can never end. If it ends, if one side can dominate and win, there is no way for another faction to recover from that without a reset and restart, like all games - play, end, restart.
> "Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition"
Competition doesn't need ever increasing resource use and hedonism, it's not the resource use which captivates people (but it can make a spectacle); competition is fine with animals running, with kickball, with Chess - 32 pieces on 64 squares creates world champions, millionaires, tournaments, audiences, lifelong obsessed people, gambling opportunities, it doesn't need galaxy spanning resource use. The thing about competition is that you can't be Usain Bolt or Magnus Carlsen or John Carmack just by throwing more resources at it. At the point where you can say "I have a Versailles on every planet in the Milky Way" and someone else says "so what, everyone has", there's no competition there. If you claim you can win the Tour de France on a bike in a small region of Earth, people will sit up and take notice.
So no, that's not really a solution either.
But even then, the goal isn't to limit human productivity, is it? It's to limit how much we work and lifestyle inflation, which doesn't require growth to go to zero.
We're already maxed out on information, tools, media and interactions.
Even if we were to assume that an arbitrarily low standard of living is acceptable, at some point that standard of living will include mass starvation and death so there is a real capacity limit. Being well below that limit is a virtue.
More importantly, there's absolutely no reason to think that technology will somehow stop pushing the carrying capacity further. More people will yield more innovation, yielding more growth, yielding more people. If there's an endpoint to that, I doubt we'll see it any time soon. Yes, I too see how insane it is to think that sometime relatively soon global GDP will double twice in a year. But twice in a decade would be just as crazy 500 years ago.
and also
No, when Larry Ellison built a 200 foot yacht, a Russian oligarch built a 250 foot yacht, The next guy will build a 300 foot yacht, etc.
There ought to be a point at which continuing increases in income fail to generate increases in either life expectancy or the proportion of adults who are able to work (not necessarily working). It would be necessary to distinguish this from the effects of anti-aging technology, but it should be possible in principle; improving diet/sleep/exercise and reducing pollution exposure isn't "anti-aging technology", nor are childcare/education.
People might still be more unhappy even though society at large delivers them things that could be unimaginable today. The creators and owners who can deliver that future will be richer than everyone else (rightfully so, imo) and that divide is what I think could make people more unhappy although they will be much better off than what we are today.
That's obviously not true today: There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around.
There almost certainly will be enough eventually, but human beings live in the now. There will be another pandemic someday. Or some other natural disaster that creates localized or temporal scarcity. We can't just spin up a new lifesaving drug or a million new homes overnight. Maybe someday we will?
That is mostly a question of regulations. The part that takes so much time is getting the vaccines approved; many researchers don't even try because they know they wouldn't have enough money to get their vaccine approved. Also, most governments negotiate hard to reduce the prices, despite the fact that economic damage from lockdowns is much greater.
Edit: You might also be poorer if you tried to compete with Amazon and were crushed like a bug by their anti-competitive practices.