AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let's Make Sure It Benefits Humanity

You saw an example of this in ecommerce during the pandemic's economic upheaval. Luxury goods recorded increased sales, as did bottom of the barrel retailers. Services and items in the comfortable middle class we all deserve suffered decreases.

You can have all kinds of price and market distortion as long as it’s a small group of people or a group of people that has a significant wealth effect over those that do not have it.

Just like you have services and products specifically for multimillionaires and billionaires, where you can get things that nobody else has, and in many cases even aware exist, you can see that happen for broader parts of society without having a deleterious effect on the overall survival of the human species.

It’s just market specialization, and we haven’t seen it with commodities yet, but we could see it with commodities in the future, and that would really change the game if commodities become available, only to those who are inside of a small pool of people that are making all the money with artificial intelligence, and the rest of us have no access to it. That is a very real possibility.

When sufficient profit motive exists to serve commodity markets for small numbers of people instead of the broad collective, a wage/price acceleration condition could be had which we haven’t seen before where more-and-more resources are locked up by a smaller and smaller but wealthier and wealthier small part of the population, essentially creating a wage / price spiral but inside of a wealth effect. Think of it is the impact of capital, and you begin to see why well concentration could lead to commodity concentration, in ways that we’ve never seen before. We have some examples that are similar to this happening right now, with the consolidation of industry, after industry by private equity, which is unprecedented.

AI has the possibility of accelerating these trends.

Just look:

https://theconversation.com/as-the-billionaires-gather-at-da...

We have seen this happen many times, where broad and cheap food groups become speciality food groups and product categories, rise in price as they become popular with the smaller wealthier elite groups (think of ox tails, bluefin tuna, certain purebred dogs, fine wines and cheeses, etc) they become out-of-reach to the general society.

We haven’t seen this for commodities but there is little reason that it couldn’t also come into effect in broad commodity markets with automation and AI remove the need for wage classes.

Ai is the automation of intellectual work, but also the ground technology for advanced robotics and automation powered by AI. The impact will be more profound than anyone here applying 20th century economic theory and colloquialisms really understands. The potential for interruptions is profound, and AGI and it’s ongoing improvements is very likely like a new nuclear threat.

People like to apply the logic of the wave theory of Internet, mobile, radio, television, etc. you can go all the way back to the weaving machine, the printing press, and the cotton gin.

The real question is whether or not this time is different. You know everything is not different until the time that it actually is and when you start thinking about building a digital brain, you’re not just talking about creating another transformational technology revolution, you’re talking about replicating the creature that actually creates those technology waves. That’s slightly different and deserves a little more consideration many of the people talking about this AI revolution tend to give it. Instead of creating something new that changes society, we’re creating something to replace the thing that creates those technology tools and waves in the first place. Something like us.

Like all technology revolutions, the resulting profits and productivity can be used for the uplift of humanity and for social good, or it can be used for selfish motivations. And to be fair, it could be used for selfish motivations, and end up benefiting all of humanity if the system allows for those selfish motivations to benefit the larger society. But that comes down to wise governance and careful shepherding by those in power. Gene Roddenbury is prescient as always.

So, in short, you either end up with amplification, like you’re talking about, which creates a stratification between the classes of benefit from AI technology, and the classes of those who were left behind, were you see a general transformation of the overall society that brings everyone into a new era of productivity that changes everything on earth as a paradigm-style transformation. Which model applies? The question is this: is it different to build a new machine or a machine that dreams up and makes new machines?

This is true, except for GPT4 which no one has been able to even come close to in actual usage.

As long as OpenAI maintains the lead by making the very best model available via a consumer-friendly interfaces, and via API, I'd wager they remain in the lead.

Which; y'know, fair enough if that does happen. Worse problems to have. Mankind will be in a great spot. I always wanted to learn to weld.

As a whole, yes... the problem is something else: quality of employment. Good paying, unionized jobs - the backbone of all Western economies in the "boom age" between WW2 and the fall of the USSR - in farming, mining, manufacturing and industry that employed lots of people in the past have either been lost to technological progress (farming) or gone off to China, India, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand - mostly because of massively lower wages, but also (especially in silicon industry) due to massively more permissive environmental protection laws.

What's left for people to make a living is mostly either low-skill and extremely low-pay stuff that reasonably can't be automated (cleaning!), a bit of medium-skill stuff like tradespeople, and high-skill intellectual jobs (STEM). Now that a lot of the high-end jobs is being threatened by AI as well, high-skilled people from there will also be pushed down, intensifying the competition for lower rungs of society even more.

And let's face it: this will be dangerous, particularly as ever more and more of the share of global wealth concentrates in the hands of very few people. Simply from a wealth relation, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are each richer than actual medieval emperors related to what the common people had. This is not sustainable, and eventually (re)distribution fights will break out.

ETA: Just came in - in the last three years, despite a global pandemic wrecking entire economies, followed by the first land-grab war by an imperialist power ever since WW2 and the resulting economic consequences, the top 5 of the uber rich actually more than doubled their wealth [1], at the expense of everyone else. Clearly, this cannot go on for much longer.

> AI will cause more of that to happen everywhere. But we'll find ways to keep ourselves busy. And more free time means that we can do things that are valuable to us.

As if. Any free time we got gets immediately usurped by the need to take up a second job just to make rent, not to mention that there hasn't been a significant reduction in hours-worked for decades (to the contrary, "expected" aka unpaid overtime has become the norm). Women didn't enter the workforce because of feminism, women entered the workforce because capitalism needed more workers to exploit - with the nasty side effect now becoming evident that young people don't become parents at all or significantly late in their careers, worsening the demographic collapse.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/14/economy/oxfam-report-weal...

You've got an interesting point there. But I'm wondering, isn't this mostly true for places like the US? Looking at it globally, it's a bit of a mixed bag: the global unemployment now is higher than 30 years ago, for example.

And about the industrialisation bit – I mostly agree with you, but let's not forget the hard fought battles for fair work conditions. We got to where we are because people stood up for their rights, not just because machines started doing the heavy lifting. The original post seems to nudge towards more rules or better safeguards with AI, kind of like what happened with the rise of factories. Are you not in favour of that?

Small sidenote: calling your own view 'realistic' might put some people off. It sort of implies other opinions are not, you know?

A key word is "centuries" - previously this industrialisation was not such a rapid process (took centuries indeed) - people had time to reskill and new generations didn't pursue professions of their parents if those jobs got automated.

This time it's more possible that someone who is going to college this year, graduate in 5 years then maybe will work 5 years to find out their professions got completely automated 10 years from now.

Part of that fight for workers' rights led directly to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels inventing Communism. My history on that topic is a little vague, so it may be mere ignorance that I have no reason to think neither foresaw Stalin.

Likewise for capitalism, given what (little) I know of Adam Smith[0], I don't think he would've foreseen the Irish potato famine.

Smith and Marx both saw the world changing, the era of feudalism passing and fading, and the need for a new system to replace it. What we have now is neither what Smith nor what Marx advocated, though bits of each are still popular.

So… what's the AI version of the February Revolution? What's the AI version of the Great Depression (as in 1929–1939, I didn't mistype "Great Recession")?

I can very easily see ways that AI can bring about surveillance to make the Stasi blush. Those amateurs were drilling holes in walls and putting bugs in watering cans, today we carry trackers and bugs in our pockets voluntarily, and even when those are restricted, laser-microphones are simple enough to be high-school student projects, and WiFi can be modified to run as wall-penetrating radar that can do pose detection with enough resolution to give pulse and breathing rates.

The Paperclip Optimiser is basically the reductio ad absurdum of capitalism's disregard for environmental impact and externalities, except that software generally has bugs and pre-LLM AI generally hasn't shown the slightest sign of what people would consider "common sense", which makes it… my Latin is almost non-existent, "reductio non absurdum"? For what AI may do.

Even between those two examples, while it's certainly possible on paper for AI to give us all lives of luxury with minimal to no work required… from the point of view of the pre-industrial age, so did machine tools, so did the transition from alchemy to chemistry (despite chemical weapons), so did electricity and the internal combustion engine (despite the integrated CO2 emissions), so did atomic theory (despite the cold war)… and despite that, we still have 40 hour weeks.

So perhaps we'll all end up like aristocrats, or perhaps rents (literal and metaphorical) will go up to take the full value of whatever UBI[1] we are given.

[0] while I doubt politicians who quote him know any better than me, this cynicism may be borne from the last decade of British Prime Ministers…

[1] IMO, UBI is the only possible way for a sustainable society where AI is at the level of the smartest human, and in practice it's necessary well before AI is that capable — if a suitably embodied AI can do every task that an IQ 85 human can do, for a TCO/time less than your local minimum living wage[2], you've already got 15% of your population in a permanent economic trap.

I also think that UBI can only avoid a hyperinflation loop when the government distributing the UBI owns the means of production, because if they don't then the people who do own the AI will be tempted to raise prices to match the supply of money.

But there's always the temptation for a government to exclude some group, for one reason or another — "Oh, not them, they're foreign. Not them, they're criminals. Not them, they're too young. Not them, they're not smart enough. Not them, they're…", and it's very hard to make those exclusion lists smaller, as those on the less-money list wield less power, and also everyone else would have to lower their expenses if they undid it and shared their wealth more equally.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage

This logic reads as an attempted proof that no man-made machine or technology can ever possibly be net harmful. That seems like an argument easily punctured.

"This is no different" is also a leap, because humans have a large but finite number of ways to be of service to each other. Mechanization augmented one of them, which shifted more value onto the remainders (mostly intellectual and emotional work). If AI can replace the latter, it's not implausible that this really will broadly displace the majority of human labor skills without growing new value areas, similar to how mechanization replaced horses.

What caught my eye is that according to the IMF jobs in the west will be affected harder than elsewhere. Meaning poor countries will benefit more. Also as with manufacturing jobs will be sent there since lower skilled workers can now perform the same task better and cheaper.

The only real issue with ai is that people will indeed be replaced, not fully, but where they are expensive by those that are cheap.

Furthermore, services such as health care and education will regress significantly in the west. Instead of solving the underlying issues your doctor will be replaced by a fast and concise google search made by ai on your behalf. The future looks bleak in the west to be honest.

So called ai will in fact mean a massive transfer of knowledge from rich to poor countries, while keeping poor countries rich, and people in rich countries poor and docile - as it has always happened when tech was designed to “help and enhance”.