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Comment by electrondood | Hacker News Reader

AI is eating the world, and the vast majority of people are not paying attention.

I don't know what artists, truck drivers, Uber/Lyft/taxi drivers, delivery drivers, programmers, doctors, judges, fast food workers, etc. are going to do.

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Perhaps humanity would happily share the benefits of machine work and we can all spend idyllics lifes eating, laughing and loving while exploring the galaxy?

Great idea!

Under the current system, the rich can do just that while everyone else literally starves to death :)

Then the rich will have no consumers.

Why do you need consumers when you have machines making most of what you want? Then you just need to be able to trade things with other people who have different machines and resources from yourself to get the bits you can't have made by your machines.

So you are saying everyone will have those machines?

Nope. He is saying power concentration will increase further. This is also Yuval Noah Harari's thesis. You can read about how that will get achieved here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-n...

Where do the inputs for the machines come from? ex: having a machine that generates CPUs out of sand and works for free would mean cheaper CPUs, but it would also mean a lot more employment in the sand industry, and there might not be a machine for creating sand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Large mining robots? Some dump trucks are already autonomous, I'm guessing excavators aren't far.

Do they stop being autonomous when they get a flat tire?

Currently, yeah, but people will certainly work down the priority chain.

Maybe they’re after some Highlander style planet where « there can be only one »

If they’re not trading with everyone else they’re not rich. Being rich /is/ the ability to trade a lot.

The idea that rich people will all leave and start a different rich-people-only economy that somehow takes all the economic activity with it isn’t how it really works, it’s the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Under a different economic system maybe. Have you seen how our one actually works? See the film Elysium for a more plausible future.

So "Childhood's End" without the aliens?

> programmers

Surely if we get to the point where programmers are no longer needed, humans have essentially been replaced by AI? Since the AI programmers could just program better and better AI?

Yes, this is called “the singularity” in AI circles. Personally, I don’t think it’s imminent, but it’s certainly worth some concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Really have a feeling that if you don’t build your nest egg in the next 5-10 years, its going to become incredibly hard.

Why will conventional investments have value? Why will it be safe? I could be retired and well off with say even 5 or 10 million and then large numbers of people lose their jobs, yet we can still make widgets and grow and distribute food with robot everything, society will fall apart. There will be fewer people with money to support themselves or buy things. I don't see the capitalist society in the US giving people basic income, but we won't need so many workers, and so anarchy.

doctors ? We are a looooooong way to go before AI can replace actual doctors.

A month ago I would have said that about actual artists.

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