What role do the majority of people realistically play in this world?
There is a lot of undone labor in the world. In developing countries the middle class has drivers, cooks, housekeepers. That’s only possible due to inequality. With automation we can all get that.
These people with tons of help by and large live fulfilled lives. You find fulfillment in family, friendships, and non necessary creation (art, research, etc); whatever makes you happy.
But most of all, the Industrial Revolution made people think we’d all be idle and nothing can be further from those predictions. Many more people, and many more jobs, and most of the world still lives in relative poverty and various forms of insecurity and unmet material and labor needs.
Finally there are a lot of problems we have (thousands of health conditions, the environment, autocrats) that will prob take centuries to tackle even with ai, robotics, and being freed up from menial labor.
If you "solve" this in any way other than giving people better options for them that are inherently also better for the environment, it's unstable — even if almost every nation tries to enforce it at the same time, whoever defects (in the Nash game theory sense) literally inherits the Earth.
(And that's why I'm also expecting Von Neumann machines to be the environmental disaster of the solar system within a century of someone making one: game theory says that whoever does that sucessfully, inherits the future light cone).
Difficult to tell, as I've seen that position held seriously here.
As the labour required to produce goods and services is automated, one possible scenario is that fewer and fewer people will stay "relevant", while the rest will sink and become invisible.
Things can be avoided, but looking at countries that have been unable/unwilling to ensure housing (as one of the 3 most fundamental material needs of the human: food, housing, clothing) stays affordable, does not raise hope. In my opinion, the housing problem is extremely easy to solve when looking at the problem as a technical one, and impossible when you include the way economic incentives are working at it.
I hope I'm wrong, but when I project the current path into future, it's not bright.
In particular zero sum resources like land ownership will be an increased challenge.
And our governments have been slow to respond to things like climate change and we could be slow to respond here.
Second, a financial gap does not necessarily translate to a material gap. Someone with 1,000,000x someone else's net worth still buys the same iPhone and drinks the same coca cola. Many important wellbeing factors are not actually blocked by finance, like healthcare and education. Even if you take all the rich people's money and repurpose to education not much will change. Maybe an iPad for every kid, but what good does that do?
Housing is actually a great example. Real estate has a way of sucking up entire GDPs worth of money. As a country you can't pay your way out of housing problems. Look at something like China which has been consistently overbuilding housing for decades now. They still have housing issues.
That's like saying "the fact there's a black hole in the centre of the galaxy is not an issue."
Extreme wealth distorts the universe around it. There are people who have no business making nation-state level decisions that are still on the speed dial of the people who are, because of their financial positions.
There's also a strong case that education blocked by finance, on a second order. Wealth creates flight opportunities. Parents who can afford it take their kids out of the default public school and take them to a magnet, charter, or private school. Not everyone can afford that, even if some are nominally tuition-free-- if they don't offer the same bussing, for example, that's going to add thousands of dollars a year in bus or petrol costs to get the kid to and from campus.
But aside from that, when the parents take their kids away, they also take their volunteerism, activity support, and holding staff accountable. The public school ends up supported by the least resourced and least concerned parents, and the students left behind suffer.
Housing is probably solvable with a more holistic central-planning mindset. Everyone wants to live in a few desirable areas, but we have no mechanism to generate more desirable areas. A planned economy could help by steering new economic development to places where housing can be built affordably, perhaps with build-out mandates. The Chinese "Ghost Cities" are actually a great idea in retrospect-- if you build everything at once before the first residents arrive, you can avoid some of the very expensive retrofit problems. Building a subway on the barren ground of a planned city is a lot cheaper than drilling under Lower Manhattan.
A secondary problem is that housing costs and the need for retirement/end of life savings creates a doom loop-- if you're paying 60% of your income on a mortgage, you can't invest in any other way, so it HAS to be the nest egg. I'm not sure how to address that-- richer and more universal pensions might help reduce the load on home equity, and there are certainly ways to de-asset-ify land (maybe replacing outright land ownership with peppercorn leases-- people wouldn't be able to "buy" a house, at best they could try to bribe the existing owner to abandon the lease and hope to grab it when the property goes back up for redistribution)
I think it’s pointless to try to prevent this. Try to block it and parents who can afford to will just move to where the public schools are good.
There’s no level of forced equality (other than everyone living in abject squalor) where there won’t be a spread of resources and some will choose to direct theirs in less or more long-term productive ways.
The funding issue is also trivial, local property taxes should be transferred to the state rather than being used directly. The idea that somehow poor neighborhoods should have poor schools is asinine and re-enforces existing class structure.
Parents and community are a massive influence, and parents will move as needed to attend better school districts, even if private schools are outlawed.
The Chinese ghost cities are a terrible idea in every way. I am mystified as to how anyone would think those are a positive. Most of them will be left to decay without ever getting occupied.
The future is a tiny elite leisure class with all the wealth and property and access to robotics and automation that does all the work for them and a huge underclass with nothing, nothing to do, and no access to that automation. Plus something that physically isolated the elites from the have-nothings so they aren’t in danger.
Those people will probably be fine, though if you’re in that $1-10million zone you could be at risk of running out of money eventually if you don’t end up being one of the people owning the automation.
In modern America, $1 million isn't enough to not have to work outside of small towns and certainly isn't enough that the rules don't apply to you.
[1] I don't even necessarily mean big things like hiring high power attorneys to get away with crimes. I mean things like cutting through bureaucracy, access to influential people/resources, the ability to bend regulations, etc.
For example, let’s say you have 5M NW, and 75% of it is in an uninsurable residential real estate. Your house is at high risk of being destroyed, and if it does you barely have the assets required to rebuild. If this happens twice you are have nothing poor.
And/or, if possible, buy yourself one small Von Neumann replicator.
Or it becomes worthless when no one else has anything and demand tanks
Essentially if AI and robotics are so expensive that only the ultra wealthy can afford them, then that also means that it is unable to compete with human labor, and therefore economically irrelevant- human labor will be cheaper, and as a result still in high demand.
Since none of that makes sense logically, it cannot play out like that. I agree human labor is about to be replaced with cheaper automation and displace a lot of workers, and I can’t predict what will happen, but don’t think the exact scenario you describe is possible.
There can be a large class of poor, but it still be cheaper for a poor person to get their goods & services (as they can) from the corporations with the automation to provide them for a fraction of the cost, and of higher quality, than someone without capital can.
When poor people get money, they want whatever technology and services the middle class or above have. They want to move up.
They don’t want to buy handmade arts & crafts from each other.
The Industrial Revolution took resources. You can’t recreate that while poor.
They are not going to recreate farming either. They won’t have the land, water rights, etc
And hunting & gathering isn’t a fallback.
But why would the corporations (or rather, their owners) even bother to do that, once robots are producing everything? And what would the poor buy those robot-made goods and services with? For money to work as universal medium, it needs to circulate - but if everything that the rich consume is made by robots that the rich also own, and it's cheaper than a human's living wage, then all trade would happen in that circle, and money used for that would never leave that part of the economy. So people outside of it simply wouldn't have anything useful to buy goods with.
Or, to put it in another way - any wealth transfer from the haves to the have-nots in such an arrangement would be pure welfare. Which, given a socioeconomic system that does not encourage altruism, to put it mildly, would only be done to the extent that is necessary to prevent a torches and pitchforks situation. And even that would only be the case until making killer drone swarms is a cheaper way to prevent any would-be uprisings than bread and circuses - and I think that, thanks to the likes of Anduril, we're already well on the way there.
Nothing or very little.
My point is that when labor is handled by automation, the poor won’t be able to create their own economy, even though they have nothing to offer and are excluded from the economy of the rich.
It sounds like we have the same understanding.
Even if a poor person (in this scenario) does get any money somehow, or anything of tradable value, it will go right back to the rich.
Until the Life-skin™ Sensubot™ lineup arrives
Control of industrial output, raw materials, energetic resources, land ownership, things like that. The rich are rich precisely because they control the economic output of their country
Access to resources. Who will own the land that the poor will labor on to grow food, or raw materials from which to create goods that they will trade?
The rich.
Why do you think the poor won't have AGI in their pockets and robots as well? If we look at how LLMs are evolving, they become easier to run on edge, and there are so many of them being pushed out every day. Costs for robotic hardware are also going down fast. Intelligence is free to have, unlike UBI. And robots can build robots, or make it cheaper to build robots.
For example instead of AI, take web search - if you are rich or poor, you get the same search space and tools. The rich are not searching better. They don't have radically better operating systems, social networks or phones. Same thing with content - we all have the same massive pool of content to watch. The rich don't have their own private movies that are 10x better.
I.e. destitute and homeless people do manage to creatively scrounge. But now imagine millions or billions of destitute people with no hope of a paying job. What are they going to scrounge in that context?
Jobs are a critical ingredient to people buying those common things with the rich.
When we went from horses to cars, we increased the volume of shipments and percentually more people work in transportation now than in 1910.
Another example - programming has been automating itself for 60 years. Each new language, framework or library, each project on Github makes future work more efficient. Yet we have seen an increase, not a decrease, in development jobs, and good salaries.
I would say humans are the critical ingredient AI needs to be effective, at least for now. And in the far future where AI can work without assistance, then it just empowers everyone to not need to work. We can use AI directly for our own benefit, automating self reliance for people. Unlike UBI, you can copy an AI and give it to everyone for free.
In both scenarios: weak AI making room for jobs, or strong AI making work not necessary, it turns out ok. But have more faith in our insatiable greed, we won't run out of work before we run out of desires.
If AGI is developed and kept closely guarded, whoever has it will have essentially limitless productivity, and quickly concentrate all wealth and power. They wouldn't even need to engage with markets, they could simply build overwhelming autonomous military power.
Like bitcoin, you are basically saying someone could outcompute humanity and own the ledger. But in reality the combined research power of humanity, which is necessary for AGI to advance further, is much deeper than any one entity could achieve in isolation. Research is a social process.
AGI won't need people to advance further. That is pretty much the functional definition.
But the bar is even lower. Just as today's rich keep increasing the economic distance between themselves and the poor, with the middle and creative classes already feeling that gravity, so will the AGI's - even if they stalled out only as smart as we are, but cheaper in inference mode. (A limitation that is highly unlikely.)
No doubt humans will facilitate AGI activity in our economy and real world for practical reasons for a little while. But at some point, they won't need us physically or socially either.
No, AI can ideate as well as any human, but that is not sufficient. Scientists ideate and test. Engineers design and test. There's always a validation stage, where ideas meet the bottleneck of reality.
Are you saying scientists without labs and tools to run experiments on could do science? It's all in the brain or GPU? That is so naive.
In this situation, we are the horses
And unless the models get leaked or stolen, whoever gets there first likely won't give out the secret sauce.
Then you have a single actor with access to, basically, limitless productivity. Would they share it? Given any use case for it, the owners of the AGI technology could trivially outcompete anyone else. Why would they let anyone else use it at all?
Those are probably going to be quite a lot of help!
Reminds me of Walmart putting small business owners in a small town out of business and then offering them a minimum wage job at their store.
I recommend watching Nomadland if you haven't already. (Update: Unless you were being sarcastic, in which case, carry on.)
It produces a two tier society where different rules apply to the rich and the poor.
It insulates the rich from the negative impact their actions have on the poor.
It results in the rich having a much greater say in democracy than the poor.
It produces problems when the rich and the poor are competing for resources (e.g. housing).
It can encourages the market to focus on the desires of the rich at the expense of the desires of the poor.
It damages social cohesion due to the rich and poor having increasingly different life experiences and worldviews.
The resources to improve the lives of the poor (and not just the very poor but the struggling middle classes), have to come from somewhere. They are not infinite. So unless you're creating a bunch of wealth from nothing, then it naturally requires a more equal distribution of existing wealth.
> China which has been consistently overbuilding housing for decades now. They still have housing issues.
This is in fact a problem of unequal distribution of resources: one of the main reasons there are housing issues is because houses have been seen as an investment and gobbled up by those who can afford to do so (all my friends in Beijing own multiple apartments), so prices rise and the poor can't get them anyway.
There are real diminishing returns to money. Some issues are surely caused by lack of funding, but that's not most real issues. Most real issues will remain even despite maximal funding. So before you start advocating for taking people's wealth you have to make a convincing argument that it can solve something.
I am very worried that autocrats will use AI and robotics to get rid of the opposition problem. I can't even imagine what Hitler or Stalin would have done with the technology we have now or will have soon.
(n.b. No archive.org evergreen link available, alas)
> " 20 years ago, roughly 8% of all US bachelor degrees were attained in the 4 core humanities subjects — a figure that’s fallen every year since 2007, with the share now sitting at just 4% per data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Conversely, STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math) have been growing at an unparalleled pace, as students swap Charles Dickens for computational dynamics and Jane Austen forJavascript."
> "Indeed, computer science has risen from a 2.7% share of all degrees in 2009 to 5.4% by the end of 2022, while engineering has risen from 7.2% to 9.4% in the same time frame — more than double the share that the core humanities subjects currently occupy."
The Industrial Revolution is often used as a benchmark of sorts for how society will adapt to a new technology that eliminates many of the jobs that were previously needed. But what is very different with AGI, or something close to it (i.e., a robot that can learn to do almost any physical job, an AI software that can learn to do almost any digital job), is that there is no new set of jobs that humans can turn to since, by definition, a physical or digital AGI should be able to learn those too. So even if humans discover a whole new set of professions -- as we did with factories and then with computers -- companies will quickly train robots/AIs to do those better and faster.
We just need these efficiencies distributed to more people. Eventually we should plateau into few hour work weeks for vital labor.
Take software for example - with each new language, library or project on Github we can automate and make it easier to build things, yet after 60 years of self-cannibalizing software we have more developers than ever.
What role do people in the Fashion industry(for ex.) play in this World?
It's all a bunch of made up stories.
We'll make up other stories.
- one is that those who control the resources become wealthier, by cutting costs, and societies become even more unequal as they are now, with the lower economic classes, who are largely unemployed, scrape together a sorry existence; disgruntled masses cause social instability (and crime) which means governments have to take a firmer hand and become more authoritarian to control them. You could also end up with social revolutions.
- another is that we transition to a different type of economy altogether, based not on scarcity of resources (as is presently), but on all citizens having their needs met without having to work for them. This has been anathema throughout history, so I'm not hopeful.
In either case, these ideas that "AI will do everything and we'll be free to do the things we enjoy doing" is complete fantasy, or at least limited to the few who will have jobs/money. You can't enjoy doing anything if you're not putting food on the table.
There are also jobs you wouldn't historically thought of where being human is an innate part of the value proposition but I've seen takes on here from people saying they'll stop watching movies and go to see live plays when movies become purely AI generated.
Maybe just "enjoy nature" would be the best bet if we survive the robot wars.
If I get to choose between the status quo, where I have to work for 30+ years to have a chance at an uncertain retirement, or spending the rest of my life exploring the question of what to do with my time, I know which I'd pick.
50 years ago a single income family being able to afford to own their home, at least one car in the driveway, school their children, and comfortably save for retirement was the generally accepted definition of "middle class". I honestly can't be bothered to even look up what passes for a more modern definition given regardless of where those goalposts get planted someone's going to argue anything north of abject poverty is "middle class". After having sat a few hundred iterations of that debate I think I can feel my soul trying to leave my body at the mere thought of doing another lap.
One of the things that freaks me out the most about this kind of cognitive-dissonance-fueled shit flinging contest is I am deeply mystified by the notion that there's even anything controversial here. Rural America is not ok. The average cost of a house and a medical degree in the US are approaching parity. The current rise in populism also didn't spontaneously arise, it's a reaction to economic pressure (among other things). How much worse does it have to get before the conversation pivots from "is there a problem" to "k, maybe we should work on some of this"?
Because you enjoy doing it. It is about the journey, not the destination. It always was and will be.
> what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do
Human life is about finding meaning. Go to a book club, learn sailing, dance at a beach, practice blacksmithing, learn to draw the best circle you can freehand, give a trully world class massage. Just ideas from the top of my head. I’m sure you can come up with even better ones.
All of the things you list are, in the hypothetical scenario, better done by robots. Therefore, they don’t serve any purpose by truly serving anyone or adding any value to society etc. Most people don’t ascribe any deeply satisfying meaning to mere personal enjoyment, so in this scenario what is the basis for extracting meaning from any human labor?
If you really want to get philosophical about it, what's the point of you serving someone else or adding value to society? Society, after all, is other people just like you. If you're trying to make them happy, why wouldn't you want to also make yourself happy? And if it turns out that we're at a technological point where everyone can keep themselves happy without any effort, why shouldn't we collectively just embrace that as a society?
Once it gets to a point where you can focus all your time on that, what happens?
I can see it already happening in the USA.
Having other people have to rely on each other somewhat holds racism back, for example.
How come? How is “going to a book club” going to be “better done by robots”? It is not an activity where there is an objective quality metric. If you enjoyed reading the book, and then enjoyed talking about the book, and had a good time then you did the book club right. Even if we have a robot which reads the book faster, extracts deeper meanings from it, and has a more engaging conversation about it you can still enjoy the act of doing it yourself.
Same with sailing. It is not necessarily the most efficient, fastest, or optimal way to get from here to there. It is on the other hand a challenge to your mind and body and that gives you satisfaction as you do it. Even if robots are faster, better equiped, or safer sailors they are not you. Only you yourself can can create the experience of sailing by yourself.
I do hobby jewelry. I design my pieces and then cast them, polish them, and gift them to friends. I don’t do it because it is cheaper than buying jewelry (it is very much not). I don’t do it because I’m better at it than others. (Very much not.) I do it because i enjoy the long walks while I’m thinking about a new design. I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how I can make a certain piece. Then i enjoy fidgeting with it until it casts just perfect. Then i enjoy polishing it, patinating it, polishing again, engraving, attaching gems. And finally I enjoy very much putting it in a neat little box and then meeting with a friend and gifting it to them. I also enjoy telling the story of how each piece was made, what things worked and what didn’t. It is a bucket of fun! But here is the thing. Even if robots were obviously better at it than me, i wouldn’t care. Wouldn’t change my enjoyment even a bit. How do i know? Because there are already right today othere who are better at it than I will ever be. Professional foundries make jewelry faster and cheaper I can ever hope to. Amazing and legendary jewellers design designs i could never dream of. Excelent crafters share their stories better than I could. So like why am I doing it? Because i enjoy doing it!
> Most people don’t ascribe any deeply satisfying meaning to mere personal enjoyment
I recommend you work on that. That is all I can say.
There can be pleasure in being a spectator, but being a performer, at least to me, is 1000 times more fulfilling. I don't care if someone else can do it, even a robot... I want to do that myself! A society with more space for personal ambitions and less need to hustle for food sounds great to me.
Likely a humanoid robot will be able to play guitar 1000x better than hendrix, then what's the point in you becoming as good as Hendrix, so you can play guitar for yourself in your basement?
The difference between today and the future is, today there are still things humans can do better than machines and robots, when there isn't, it will be weird.
Think of your favorite food. Now, replace eating that food with watching someone else eating it. Is that as enjoyable? Now fast forward to 1000 years in the future where robot humanoids are eating your favorite food and turning it into their form of nutrition.
I mean agree to disagree and stuff, but I just cannot for the life of me understand why someone or (some entity) doing something removes from your own pleasure of doing it yourself, your way.
My last attempt, cooking for my family. Let's say a robot can make a 100x better dinner than I can, why would my family want me to cook them food, even though I like it?
See what I mean? It's nice you enjoy it, but you're going to be 1% as good as what you could have, so it's likely not going to be worth doing the things you like doing, even if you like the journey?
I think this is an unhealthy world view. I've certainly learned thus after years of therapy. Others derive self-worth from self-validation.
We'll never be fast at math as calculators, yet their exist people who enjoy doing head-math. Doing a jigsaw puzzle has no inherent worth, yet people love doing so. Those people exist so it's a good idea to try to understand their perspective.
Not everyone's idea of fun is "Creating value for others"
Guns are great for hunting, but people still learn archery, because it's fun to shoot an arrow.
Another aspect is human connection: I would prefer eating an average meal made by someone close, rather than an amazing meal made by machine. Machines can't add the special ingredient of love :)
I would love to learn blacksmithing, for the sole reason that forging a sword from an iron/steel ingot is so fucking metal and awesome.
Why do people still play video games? And not only that, but do crazy stuff like speedruns or self-imposed limitations that make it borderline impossible to win?
It will be strange.
Dark. Very dark.
Look at neighborhoods where nobody has anything to do. They aren't places you would want to live, or even spend 5 minutes in.
When I was in college, automation was envisioned to reduce injuries to people, increase access to goods, and to create more discretionary time. Somehow we’ve lost the focus on human outcomes.
It seems reasonable to think this is a possibility. We might get something that could be called ‘AGI’ but that still frequently requires human intervention.
But I'm a pessimist.
If everybody had their basic needs covered, that should actually lead to more prosperity and reduced crime, leading to more people being able to produce superior knowledge, art and enterprises of all sorts. To make science or art or whatnot, you first need to be able eat!
The question of whether Silicon Valley's "AI luminaries" are genuinely pursuing this utopia or have a more selfish hidden agenda is another matter entirely.
Yes. But the flipside of that is that it's hard to earn money. The cheaper it is to live, the harder it is to make money.
The problem UBI solves is when most humans can no longer compete with machines in the economic system. Once that happens there are only a few options, and the least unpleasant is simply to give them (us) money tokens.
But LLMs/transformers are not this technology. We need some significant advancements before we start seeing things like this.
The predatory institutions will still be there in the UBI future and price things accordingly, do a little hostile takeover here and there, bribe some politician and get a totally not monopoly started in as many sectors as they can.
For UBI to actually work it needs to spring out of the goodwill from a monstrous institution that brutalizes all other financial entities or from a financial apocalypse that leaves virtually no one standing.
A much more likely entry point to "free living conditions" is free as in advertisment driven data mining and resale. Think of Google being your landlord, offering free Google fiber with some extra packet inspection clauses. McMeta down the street offering free fastfood adhering to the latest "dietary meta" catchphrase. And Palantir hands out free phones with preloaded internet and bomb homing beacons to streamline military interventions against you when the gov decides you're a terrorist.
That's a more likely "UBI scenario", simplified by a few steps as whatever UBI money you'd get in a cash scenario would end up pocketed by the usual suspects anyway
I wonder what this would cost, and assuming it's affordable, why we don't simply do it.
People are aspirational, my observation of people that have sufficient means to just survive is that a large portion will apply themselves to levelling up in a variety of ways, some in crafts, some in small business, some in music, sports, etc.
Of those that do, a number go on to join leaders in their chosen fields.
Sure, another portion might also kick back and do little else but doom scroll, but that's on them and at least that's keeping them off the streets, adding to the crime stats, etc.
I'm in a pretty unique position because I've never had a strong drive to work but got lucky and got that passive income without having it as a goal I worked towards. If I had no financial or social pressure I would do little else than play video games all day.
Considering how popular social media is I suspect I'm right about most of the population. I mean just look on the streets, in subways etc. most people are addicted to cheap pleasure
Parents would be spending quality time with her kids, helping them with their homework or helping with their practice - sports or music, instead of getting frustrated looking pile of laundry and kids don't have nothing to wear.
Kids now have more questions due to quality engagement. So they would visit library or if they are into sports, parents spend more time with them.
Automation has always been there. We just pick up things we didn't get a chance to pick up. We travelled on cars when horses were no more needed. We built bigger and better things, when we don't have to make our own hammer. Also, we created more problems from these and needed more innovation to fix them.
We always worked around 40 hrs a week since time immemorial. So, we will continue to work 40hrs.
In countries where labour is cheap enough relative to the professional class (eg Singapore) humans are currently hired to perform these tasks.
This is a bad example I think: Roomba seems to be dying, as other competitors are making vacuum robots that look similar yet are technically far superior. It's almost like talking about spreadsheets and giving Lotus as the canonical example.
Ah, you say: But such jobs don't employ many people! Most people do things that nobody cares if they're automated away. Surely we can't all be chess players or artists?
To which I say: The job market will adapt, and people will move into those jobs where customers prefer to have a human. We have no real idea what those jobs are today, but some of them might be the things you wish you had more of, but are too expensive for most of us to hire someone for. (Interior decorator? Personal chef? ...)
But yes, I share your vision for a post-scarcity society.
I'm 99% sure that old ideas of eugenics will crop up massively (together with a new strain of pro-colonial history-denialism in the "truth-spouting" right), and a new age of genocidal wars with robots will take place for taking over material resources.
We under estimate how much of "Western morality" has nothing to do with the "goodness of our hearts" (just see the propaganda for wars over the years). Very dark times ahead.