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Comment by vc8f6vVV | Hacker News Reader

Let's start from basics. People need to eat, so somebody needs to make food. Those people need tools. Somebody needs to make tools. Now for this to work they need to make extra food and exchange it for tools. This exchange has been in development since before human existed (look at wolves pack) -- never perfect, but kind of worked. So you want to make something you like and nobody needs? No problem, go for it. Where are you supposed to get food? Do you want a government to pay you the basic income? That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food. Oops. In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand. How do you know you Java library is worth a breakfast?

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I'm not sure this has anything to do with the original comment or point I was trying to make.

That being said:

> In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand.

Literally all of economic development and growth is predicated on the idea that this is not true. If work was actually zero-sum and all of the transactions gave you the exact value that you sold, there would be no point in forming a society around this.

Society works because combined labor produces more value than is put into the process. That has always been the case. You get more food out of farming than you put into it, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile to farm.

> That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food.

Also, the only reason we're having this conversation is because the "tools" that are being made will (very theoretically) be made for practically free by AI.

We're not talking about a world where the tools stop existing. This entire conversation started with someone asking "but what if there's no more need for humans to make the tools?"

You are talking about added value and it's beyond "basics" :) The point was "if your work has no value, there is no breakfast to exchange it for".

> You are talking about added value and it's beyond "basics" :)

I don't know, I think it's pretty important to a conversation about automating jobs that we not treat jobs as if they're an optimized equivalent exchange. The whole premise there is that the machines are going to start producing a lot of value without any human input. If it happens, it's not going to be equivalent exchange.

If we're not talking about added value, then there's nothing to worry about because then the machines can't automate the jobs, because that would be added value.

> if your work has no value, there is no breakfast to exchange it for

My point more specifically here is that there's a lot of value in the world that can't be exchanged for breakfast, something that (as far as I can tell from your other comments on this thread) you actually agree with, right? There's value that exists outside of traditionally monetarily compensated jobs.

In a (again, entirely theoretical) world where AI gets rid of the need to earn your breakfast, that doesn't mean there's not going to be anything of value to do anymore and that everyone's life is going to be meaningless.

Machines don't produce a value, humans do. Simply because the "value" (added or not) has a meaning only when you exchange goods or services. Nail gun makes things much faster but it's a carpenter who produces the value.

Money is simply a universal equivalent of that value, nothing more. So if you give me a breakfast for help with unloading your truck, it's still an exchange, and my work's value is equal to "one breakfast" even no money was involved.

AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange. It may eliminate some jobs (happened before), but it will create others because human society is not only about food (not sure ChatGPT can help here though), but about interactions which are not going to be automated by ChatGPT (think of sex, power).

> Simply because the "value" (added or not) has a meaning only when you exchange goods or services.

I feel like your definition of value is jumping around quite a bit. In another comment you described "value" as essentially any kind of social capital or personal reward. Now it's explicitly transactional?

In any case, this is a very narrow definition of value that I don't think matches up with what most people who worry about automation are talking about. It's certainly not what the original thread was talking about when it worried about people without jobs not being able to find meaning in work. What most people think of as useful or meaningful purpose in their lives does not strictly map to transactional value.

> AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange.

Then there is no problem! This isn't an issue if AI isn't going to take jobs away.

But it's not how economy works.

People on top of the company don't make anything but earn more than anyone that does, Not like 2x more or 5x more but 10-1000x more. There is no person on earth that produces million of value a month in actual improvement of society, aside maybe a world leader that stops a wary from happening. Not a man in widget company making beepy boxes that spends time on meetings about barely related to that. And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is, so the corporate wealth doesn't even benefit the country it is in.

The whole problem is that any improvement in production is only tangentially passed to society and mostly exploited to make few wealthy

> And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is

How did you figure that? Corporate tax rate in the US is 21% which is roughly equivalent to an effective tax for a single filer with about $180K in income. Can't say we are talking about "normal employee" here. Besides if you are talking about dividends (which are distributed _after_ 21%), there is a dividend tax on top of that, which, depending on your share class, can be the same as a normal tax rate. So yeah, nowhere close, usually +21% for the preferred stock.

Also don't fall to that communist idea. I grew up in the USSR where we had a "fair" distribution (no, it wasn't fair) -- trust me, you don't want to live in that world. There were some upsides, but still, and it didn't end up well.

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