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Comment by thomascgalvin | Hacker News Reader

I just wish I was part of the first generation to benefit from post-scarcity, and not the generation that is going to have to go through the turmoil of getting to post-scarcity.

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Oh don't worry my guy, the odds that we make it to post-scarcity at all are not super high. Just vibe with the slide down the slippery slope, it's all you can do.

the generation that went thru the industrial revolution would have said the same thing, except they'd wished they were in your position today.

People just don't realize how good today is compared to the past - and of course, how good the future would be (nuclear war notwithstanding).

Any time this argument gets trotted out it's using a baseline of European post-agrarian feudalism. There were definitely peoples in the past who enjoyed a high quality of life for many generations, but they tended to be small groups concentrated in areas of abundance, and were usually among the first to be exterminated by outsiders.

The fact that the industrial revolution created better life for most people doesn't prove an AI revolution will do the same.

The classical counter-example are horses - the industrial revolution increased the demand for horses, but once the cars became cheap horses numbers and jobs drastically decreased.

But in this scenario, the horses had no agency to become anything else.

I refuse to believe humans don't have agency.

Agency is only half of the equation. The other half is opportunity. With Industrial Revolution, horses had neither. With AI revolution, people may retain agency, but I doubt there will be many opportunities available.

I guess we can get AGI and that will lead to great and numerous inventions. Of course how power works in that world is extremely uncertain. Most likely power would flow to a corporation or an authoritative government unfortunately. Not to the people.

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