This is something missing from the discussion around AI. There is fatalism or skepticism about AI capabilities vs human usefulness but very little positive philosophy about using AI to augment human capabilities rather than replace them. Even if automating everything were possible it doesn’t mean we need to and I’d argue that we should not want to.
You don't have to eliminate all scarcity before you can transition to a mode of economic behavior which is not predominantly scarcity driven. (And the sooner we do so the better. The scarcity driven model that we're using has no steering wheel and there are hazards on the horizon worth steering away from.)
Why would anyone share access ? It's a one shot prisoner dilemma - whoever controls the best system first eliminates the competition and wins.
What do they win? A bunch of money?
Post scarcity could mean many different things. One alternative to scarcity is consent. Behave in a way where enough people revoke consent, and your money won't go far enough to buy anything. So in that model they'll share access because if they don't they lose.
Intelligence is not the only bottleneck on getting things done. Yes, eventually it could build its own robot minions and farm food for its master and construct some kind of army of hunter killer bots to ensure compliance and dominate the planet, but that kind of conquest takes decades, if not centuries. Maybe it can play 4 dimensional chess, but we still have some advantages.
We need post-scarcity economic models so that we can ensure that cooperation > individual continues to hold. The scarcity-driven ones we're using currently don't give us any legal nonviolent ways to stop outcomes like this, but that's not a law of physics, that's just a quirk of history.
I think there are a million more immediate risks than a robot uprising, but as it turns out, putting a steering wheel on our economy would help with those too.
Whether or not we accept that this is possible and whether or not we are willing to make the changes necessary is our choice. But it is not a thing that happens so much as a thing we make happen.
We could do the same thing except instead of basing the money on the collective willingness to attack the neighboring village it could be a collective willingness to feed, house, and medically care for the neighboring village. You couldn't press people into it will fear like Caesar did, but hope might work. Money a proxy for what people believe in, and beliefs can change.
I still don't understand where the money comes from, who is paying for people to grow food and farm the land? Is this only a local community idea, because I am talking at a global level. We see that "hope" doesn't work at scale, people are inherently selfish and don't necessarily want to help others beyond their current community (and even then, that can be a stretch), therefore, creating a profit motive where both parties of a trade are better off is what caused the single greatest change in human standards of living in the world. "Hope" is not what achieved that but rather harnessing human greed as its own force and steering it into productive pursuits.
Even without the Romans, look at how the US banking system works. Money enters circulation when people are granted loans--loans which are issued based on the banker's belief that the debtors' endeavors will succeed. If the technology for providing these necessities improves to the point where it is believed that they're easy to provide (some may argue that it already has), then we can create new money based on collective support for that goal.
This money could be more legitimate than what you get from a banker, because it is backed by activity which obviously benefits the people. By contrast, when you accept a dollar you have no way of knowing whether the loan that put it into circulation was for activity that helps you or harms you. Collective trust in bankers is pretty shaky, and yet it still seems solid enough to keep the current system afloat. Collective support for solving the basic-needs problem would be a much sturdier foundation for a monetary system.
The point is, "there aren't enough resources for that"-style argument only works for resources like metal or water or labor... things that we can't create from thin air. Money is created from thin air to meet the needs of the system. If there's enough collective willpower to get something done, a lack of money can't stop it because we can just change the way money is created in support of the desired activity.
- money based on which loans bankers will grant (e.g. the status quo)
- money based on ensuring that people's basic needs are met such that they're able to take on more economic risks with their free time (re: starting businesses and such)
What do you suppose the merits of the former are?
It's not about altruism, it's just about what works best. I think there's a lot of evidence to be found by just looking around that the former isn't working especially well. The only thing holding the latter back is buy-in, and if things continue to deteriorate there will have to come a point where giving it a try makes more sense than continuing to base our money on arbitrary decisions made by people we don't trust.
This is not how logic works. Saying that one system is not working well (which is, again, debatable, see how China and Japan grew in the last 75 years) is not evidence for another system working better. Ultimately you seem to have a naive view of the world and not much understanding of macroeconomics. I will have to point you to a textbook because I cannot explain it all from this level of understanding.
> Look at all of the growth we've achieved, high-five guys!
What information I have from my travels and conversations has lead me to believe that the global market has been more of an exploitative force than an uplifting one, but I'm perhaps a bit too young to have a basis for comparison. I wasn't really aware of these things at a time when I could have a "before" snapshot. I just see the cracks in the "after" one.
Fatalism, case in point. There are all sorts of things that shareholders might like to happen which don’t because society doesn’t let them. In the possible future where we can automate anything a human centered approach will pick and choose what we automate.
This places the blame on the shareholders, but the reason why they want to automate jobs is because at the end of the day each of us wishes that everyone else's job was automated. We may not wish it explicitly, but we do generally wish that accessing those skillsets cost less money, and will generally happily spring for a sufficiently good automated version of just about anything.
Shareholders just want to be the first to capitalize on our common impulse to choose cheaper options.
I believe buying shares in early stage companies improves the world, since it helps new technology and new efficiencies form.
But at some point, after the IPO, it just becomes endless "extraction of rents", and it is what leads to "enshittification" (to invoke Cory Doctorow's term) of everything. At best, it is a zero-sum game, where hedge funds take everyone's money (see the movie Dumb Money about GameStop short squeeze). And of course, there is even regulatory capture, with 2020 bailouts by the Fed exceeding its mandate to bail out the stock markets.
It would be great if future IPOs would be replaced with ICOs, where the shareholders would actually be bought out by utility token holders. If you need a metaphor or example, imagine "Disney Dollars" being used to buy out shareholders of Disney, Inc. The Disney Dollars are actually bought by customers of Disney World, Disneyland or Disney online platforms, who pay for actual things, and they get paid out to people working in Disney World, Disneyland, or on Disney IP. The people who visit Disney World or work there actually care about things like paid health insurance, or the quality of the local water, etc. It's more democratic. But the shareholders don't. They'd be glad to fire everyone and replace them with Westworld-like robots if it increased profits and dividends.
If cities had their own currency, then they wouldn't go bankrupt like Detroit did. Once upon a time it was Motor City, but then all the factories got automated and the money for cars went to shareholders around the country. It gutted the economy of the city. That's what happens with shareholders of large concerns that have "made it" and went IPO.
And of course cities could go bankrupt even if they had their own currencies. Having their own currency didnt protect countries like Zimbawe or Venezuela.
Sounds like when ancaps complain about taxes, except it is inside private corporations who are accountable not just to customers and vendors in their marketplace but ultimately to shareholders and management teams that give huge bonuses to their CEOs. No thanks I think I prefer autonomous decentralized networks to replace that.
Because the shareholders don’t even live there and dont care if the water is polluted (sometimes they even pay off politicians like in Flynt). OK so you claim these pension funds help pensioners around the country, at the expense of enshittifying things or buying up 25% of real estate or farmland in USA. Monsanto and John Deere IP for farmers enforced by government. Extreme centralization through corporations like BlackRock and State Street, fomenting wars in Ukraine to buy up cheap land there … but I hear socialism is bad. OK.
As far as hyperinflation… they have to tax the money back to remove it from circulation. The current overton window in USA on taxation is so far from that, we’re on our way to massive money printing HERE. The Congress didnt have the guts to raise taxes (fiscal policy) after hugely expansionary monetary policy, so the Fed had to exceed their mandate and raise interest rates to fill the gap. Neither Dems or Republicans have the guts to reduce the deficits long enough to reduce the debt. Cutting taxes only increases the problem of hyperinflation.
If cities had their own currencies they’d have their own fiscal policies too, as well as monetary. Compare how the PIIGS countries fared after they lost their currencies and joined the Euro. For every Zimbabwe and Venezuela hyperinflation there’s multiple countries running out of money and fuel (eg Sri Lanka, Haiti) undergoing austerity or under the thumb of IMF, World Bank being told what to plant etc. Their only hope is to maybe have China hold their leash for a while instead of USA. This isn’t sovereignty. Whether it’s Libya or Saudis or Ukraine or any number of countries.
At least China invests in their infrastructure and tries to make peace deals. USA just does that whole economic hitman thing. Nah. I dont want my pension to be funded by oppressing others.
? I have been automating my job since day 1, with shell scripts and Python and ansible and terraform and anything else that suits that work at hand. Granted, I'm a sysadmin so maybe it's different for others?
And lacking a full-time job doesn’t make you eligible for entitlements.
In the modern US we convert improved productivity into looser labor markets and invest enough into ubiquitous surveillance and militarized police that nothing comes of it.
I hope it’s better wherever you are, but here you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone.
If the "fixed amount of work reduced by automation" assumption that is necessary to support "by definition can't be everyone" was true, >99% of humanity would per permanently unemployment by the past progress of technology.
Real wages, age of home ownership, age when folks decide to start a family, choose a metric that will stand up to any scrutiny and the advance of broad-based welfare has been in retreat for well over a decade.
Slightly more anecdotally but still very well documented is the proliferation of homeless folks, often families now, often recently employed now, living in ever-growing tent encampments in major urban areas.
When operations research PhDs have all real constraints removed social, regulatory, and legal and arbitrarily increasing compute and governmental influence (we just the other day tore down the Chevron Deference doctrine) things get real neo-feudal, real fast.
In an era of ever increasing and compounding change, appeals to past compromises between the donor class and the working person are just talking points. All I hear is “got mine”.
I have never in my life had a job where the reaction to employees being more productive was to have fewer employees rather than increasing output. Everyone absolutely can stay on payroll, we just get more stuff done on the same headcount and budget, and the company turns more profit for it.
In every single quarter since Q1 2023 the big shops have shattered EPS and driven 12 month forward PE to the level where NVIDIA is pretty much a proxy for how corrupt can be considered legal.
I like free markets, well-refereed. Competition is good.
This dystopian nightmare is nothing to do with capitalism and gives markets a bad name.
In a world where NVIDIA has net earnings north of 80% (the highest of any company in history not engaged in the slave trade) and their only credible competitor is helmed by the cousin of the CEO?
No. I do not in fact believe that payroll will track automation in a way that is humane.
Also, cooperation is better.
By construction a market that doesn’t work well is suffering from a market failure: monopoly, duopoly, governmental capture, important people’s kids promoted beyond their abilities.
Capitalism has a bad name because we tolerate not only market failures but induced market failures: the first thing anyone seems to do after winning in a market is to try to construct barriers to further competition. No Soviet career party man, no apparatchik is such a fan of knowing the right people as the capitalist who won a hand of poker.
The tech business is addicted to this shit: a software venture isn’t truly considered a success until it’s a monopoly, entrepreneurs avoid markets with established players in them.
But this is because of the funding model. The people who fund software plays have convinced LPs that they can beat the market by a lot, and over the long run it’s not many people who can do that without cheating.
So everyone cheats and tries for market manipulation that is illegal on paper. We used to prosecute those people for securities fraud.
I work at solving these problems because I wish they were already solved. If some AI came along and solved them better, that would be great. Then I could move on to more interesting problems.
You move one layer up or down the stack. Build things that support AI, or orchestrate it.
One thing humans have and AI models don't is private personal experience. Your perspective can still be useful even if AI can do many things on its own.
Another thing humans have and AI don't - responsibility, you can't do anything to a bad AI, you can punish a person, so we can trust people more where there is a big stake.
Is that your job? What will you do when AI does it better, faster, and cheaper than you can do it?
I'm nearly fifty. Most people in the industry are way younger than me. A few are older. In twenty years, most of my generation will no longer be active in the industry. And most of the industry will consist of people who aren't even part of it right now because they are still toddlers or in school. Reason for this is that our industry is still growing and is dominated demographically by people below 30. The older ones don't disappear, they are simply outnumbered.
A lot of people my age have all sorts of opinions about AI and what it will or won't do. Most of that won't matter because in a few short years, we'll be side lined. I'll just be an old man ranting and nobody will care. Nor should they IMHO. Or alternatively, I delay that a bit by keeping myself young and relevant by learning new things. Including AI.
I have a few interns in my team aged around 20. Smart people, fast learners. And they are treating AI in a very rational way: a tool that's there that they need to be able to use in order to function. Pretty fun to watch how quickly they pick things up. Mental agility of young people is fun to watch. And I like having people like that around.
Anyway, there is no royal we. Whenever I see somebody proclaim something like "we should ...", I mentally translate this "I think we should do X" and then ask myself why anyone should bother to even listen. Sounds a lot weaker like that. Younger generations paying attention to older ones making such proclamations is not how humanity moves forward. It's actually by younger generations mostly ignoring the older ones and doing things differently and then the old generations die off and things have changed.
AI is exactly like every other disruptive tools that have come along. Most of the people ranting against those tools will be gone and forgotten in a few decades. They and their opinions don't matter. Look at new generations and how they use AI effectively. That's the future. And they too will get old.
Fatalism or you misunderstood what I wrote. We are here contemplating possible futures: one is the hypothetical automation of everything which no one has ever experienced and therefore your experience has no adequate analogy. If it does happen then the old in industry won’t be replaced by the young with a different perspective just like always as no one will be working anymore. In this scenario the opinions of the young matter as much as the old because both are equally irrelevant to industry and society at large.
We've got a lot of big issues to solve on this planet before we worry about traveling to any others.
one of the biggest reasons that so many people are involved in farming is that there are a huge number of operations which are extraordinarily difficult to scale. some things can only be picked by hand or only grow in specific soil conditions or are clever enough to escape enclosures routinely.
this is where automation comes in. autonomous tractors, robotic pickers, synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery, drone-applied fertilizer, AI-enabling video monitoring, etc.
But the latter is coming, it’s just more work than raising capital to buy Hopper and pushing the scale.