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Comment by tonygrue | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts are a few:

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.

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As optimistic as your comment is, the fact that there are lots of problems does not mean that we will tackle them. In my opinion, if we don't aim at doing anything about it, the gap between the rich and the poor will widen. Both between societies, and within one society. I'm now in Canada, but in my childhood country, most of the recent "smart" (meaning connected) devices and the recent AI models are not available. This is starts a viscious cycle that makes things worse and worse. For the less connected high teck devices, the ratio of the price (That's set based on supply/demand in the richest countries) to income (that's damanged by sanctions and general government stupidity) is getting so high that it's really hard to get high-end devices.

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.

I share all your concerns. I considered mentioning them but figured I should keep my reply focused on idea of freeing people up isn’t inherently bad.

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.

Is our goal to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, or to improve the lives of the poor? Because the gap itself is actually irrelevant to poor people's lives. Rich people's improvement outpacing poor people's is not necessarily an issue.

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.

> Rich people's improvement outpacing poor people's is not necessarily an issue.

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)

> Parents who can afford it take their kids out of the default public school and take them to a magnet, charter, or private school.

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.

You are correct that there will never be perfect equality. However, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't take steps to get closer to equality. For example, wealthy parents sending their kids to private schools isn't as much of an issue when it doesn't take money away from public schools (e.g. via vouchers).

It's fairly easy to prevent. Accreditation is a legitimization mechanism eminently modulatable by law. When only state schools are accredited and truancy is enforced, there is no other option.

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.

It’s not a funding issue, or at least not just a funding issue. In many states, the lower performing districts have more per-pupil funding than higher performing schools.

Parents and community are a massive influence, and parents will move as needed to attend better school districts, even if private schools are outlawed.

We can find a reason for any intervention to fail, but empiricism should be our guide, not our ability to conjure failure scenarios.

In the US, magnet and charter schools are free and operated by public school districts. When there aren't enough slots, admission is typically handled by lottery so wealthy parents can't pay to get their children in. What they can do is move to a neighborhood with better public schools, and in fact we see a very direct relationship between public school ratings and housing prices in that school's catchment area.

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.

You outlined how education is blocked by finance at an individual level for a specific family or person. We're talking about the national level. Do you think that with more funding every kid can go to a charter school? The problem is that the amount of elite and high quality education is limited. Unless your plan is to give every kid an iPad, then your plan can't just be increasing funding, it must include how to fix the education system from the bottom up.

If robotics and AI are doing all the work, what are the former workers going to do for money? Nothing. They won’t have money. It’s not like the rich will have 1e6 x the poor. The poor will have nothing at all.

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.

What will happen to those of us who are not rich but also not poor? Upper middle class with net worth between 1 and 10 million?

Net worth of over $1 million is rich. An extremely small number of people have that much money.

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.

1% of world population have more than $1M. That will be almost 100M people globally. I don’t see how you can own anything substantial (eg datacenter, power plant, factory, etc) if you have less than 100M net worth, hence my original question.

So you can own whole percent of something substantial.

It seems to me that when people use the term "rich" they generally mean some combination of "wealthy enough that you don't have to work" and "wealthy enough that normal rules don't apply to you"[1].

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.

Bifurcation of society with fewer and fewer people moving upward in social status. The poor have nothing. The bar of assets required to not become poor continues to raise.

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.

Let’s say I have 10M in stocks. What is the optimal strategy to not end up as “have nothing poor” in an automated economy?

Make sure the stocks that you own include some of the companies making the robots and/or the AI that do the be automation.

And/or, if possible, buy yourself one small Von Neumann replicator.

If you have 10M in stocks you should be able to figure this out on your own, assuming you’re self-made.

Try to advance to 100M. 10M might not be enough in 50 years.

> Your house is at high risk of being destroyed, and if it does you barely have the assets required to rebuild.

Or it becomes worthless when no one else has anything and demand tanks

That seems unrealistic. Can you give us an example of a specific residential property that is both uninsurable, and recently sold for ~$4M? Being uninsurable tends to crush value.

Sure, so your primary residence becoming uninsurable is another way to go from have to have not

If only the ultra rich can afford and use these technologies, and they no longer employ or involve the poor- isn’t that the same as the rich simply not existing for most practical purposes? What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own, offering their own non-robotic and non-AI goods and services to one another like they already do now?

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.

> What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own

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.

> 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.

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.

> And what would the poor buy those robot-made goods and services with?

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.

Exotic dancers and other human commodity products will still be in demand.

Until the Life-skin™ Sensubot™ lineup arrives

> What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own, offering their own non-robotic and non-AI goods and services to one another like they already do now?

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

> What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own, offering their own non-robotic and non-AI goods and services to one another like they already do now?

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?

> What stops "the poor" from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own

The rich.

> a huge underclass with nothing, nothing to do, and no access to that automation

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.

If someone doesn’t have a job that pays, how do they get those things?

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.

This jump from "AI assistance" to "millions or billions of destitute people" is unjustified. Yes, AI can assist, but it doesn't replace human presence as it is now, in any field. Instead it creates demand for improvements across the board and creates more work for us.

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.

This is all speculation based on the development of AGI. If we achieve AGI, yes, it would enable humanity to have a Star Trek-style fully automated space communism utopia. However, that hinges entirely on access to AGI and the fruits of it's productivity being distributed across the population, instead of hoarded by a small group.

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.

Here you are making a mistake - AGI by its nature should know all there is to know, and yet need to make progress by searching for new approaches and discoveries. That doesn't happen all at once, it works field by field, and discoveries actually come from experimental validation. There is no "secretly developing AGI" to "quickly concentrate all wealth and 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.

> the combined research power of humanity, which is necessary for AGI to advance further, is much deeper than any one entity

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.

> AGI won't need people to advance further. That is pretty much the functional definition.

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.

> When we went from horses to cars, …

In this situation, we are the horses

Because AGI is probably going to be incredibly expensive to develop, require mega-scale access to data and compute to train, etc.

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?

If you don't have a job that allows you to pay the rent and food, then access to AGI tools -- even free -- won't help you very much.

I don't know why you'd say that. Makes applying for EBT and food stamps easier. And finding the local soup kitchens, the best places to buy a tent, what the laws against vagrancy and camping "overnight" in your car. Which brands of cat food are least unhealthy for human consumption. (you'll have to jailbreak the model to have it answer that last one.)

Those are probably going to be quite a lot of help!

"Sorry we created this AI that took away your job and made you homeless, but in exchange you can use our cool app for free that will help you escape starvation and maybe even find the optimal homeless shelter! And think of it -- your sacrifice has made it possible for devs earning 6-figure salaries to be more productive, and doctors to write better emails, and the USA now has a higher GDP than ever! Large corporations profits are up! Society (for the rest of us) is better because of it."

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.)

Poe's law strikes again! The cat food bit wasn't over the top enough?

Two great of a gap between rich and poor produces a number of problems:

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.

Humans have an innate sense of fairness that isn't satisfied by "everyone played by the same rules, so wildly different outcomes are ok." Eventually resentment builds up and an extra-legal solution transpires.

If a mob demands sacrifice we must appease it? That sounds very different to the story of poor people's plight. Especially if you consider that random condition will create winners and losers.

We can try to fight against human nature all we want, but the Peasant's Revolt, the French Revolution, American Revolution, Haitian, Revolution, Russian Revolution, etc all stem from a group feeling like things weren't fair. Convincing the aristocracy that they need to change the system so to one that doesn't create winners and losers, doesn't seem to work, so nature has a pressure relief valve whether they want one or not.

> Is our goal to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, or to improve the lives of the poor? Because the gap itself is actually irrelevant to poor people's lives.

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.

But financial wealth is not equal to material wealth. Financial wealth literally is created from nothing, and its mapping to material wealth is arbitrary. The last 4 years are a great example of massive paper gains while everyone was losing.

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.

> But most of all, the Industrial Revolution made people think we’d all be idle and nothing can be further from those predictions.

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.

Creation is the single most fulfilling human experience after having children (which is also creation). I'm not sure we want to take that away from us.

No health problems if there's no people to have them.

Additionally issues around global carbon footprints quickly become tractable when you eliminate the bulk of humanity.

Only at the 99.9% level, and only briefly before the majority of the remainder look at the open and empty planet and go "oo, nice, free land for a big family".

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).

I must have deadpanned that a little too hard. Was intended as sarcasm.

Ah, fair enough.

Difficult to tell, as I've seen that position held seriously here.

I mean, bricking the human population would certainly reduce our species carbon footprint, so the position itself should be fairly uncontroversial. Expressing excitement at the prospect seems pretty broken however.

I'm curious, do we see a decline in art freshmen in recent years?

I'm not sure first year students always have selected a major, but if we go by degree at graduation, I think this article (and the charts therein) is useful: https://www.chartr.co/newsletters/2023-10-08

(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."

"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."

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.

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