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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

The slaves were useful, the slave-owners were "useless" (because why pay one to do the work when a slave could do it for free?). How is a society in which 99% of people don't need to work because slaves do all the work for them different from one in which 99% of people don't need to work because robots do the work for them?

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The slave-owners were slave-owners because they had military control over the slaves. (Most of the time, anyway; some slave revolts were successful.)

It is not clear how long humans will retain control over AIs.

The 0.1% scenario kicks in long before you get independent, sentient AI agents. That is, giving humans the reins doesn’t solve the problem.

During the Great Depression the unemployment rate was 25% in the U.S. What happens when it’s not 25% but 99% that are not just unemployed but unemployable?

It will start with birth licenses (the obseletariat population will be managed down) and then maybe simply food will be cut off. And don’t think you’re going to go off the grid and grow your own. There will be no off the grid. It will all be owned.

The difference is the distribution of power. In your second scenario, where 99% of people don’t need to work, very little of that 99% will have any political power because of their ownership of the machines that run the economy.

To make the point clear, I don’t think it would be a very good day for the slaves if those in power found out all labor could be accomplished by machines at a tenth of the cost of the slaves’ room and board.

There is differences in resource distribution: a society where no work is available but everyone has their wishes taken care of, to a certain degree, is way different from a society where no work is available and some few live like royalty while the majority of the population lives in absolute poverty.

Both futures would be possible with AI that makes human labor obsolete.

There has never been a situation in history where 99% of people live off a much smaller 1% of slaves. That's insane.

I didn't mean 99% living off 1%; I mean 100% of the society living off slave labor and only around 1% doing any real work. The slaves didn't count as people back then, similar to the robots in these discussions.

In ancient Sparta, for instance, it's estimated that there were 5-10 slaves for every Spartan. That means no Spartan had to work.

I'm quite sure the 99.9% from GPs comment refers to the whole population, not just the ruling class. The 0.1% alludes to today's ruling class.

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