Maybe a weird question, but how does a capitalist economy work where AGI-performed-labor is categorically less expensive than human-performed labor? Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?
The first is the bill gates "income tax for robots" idea which does a kind of hand wavey thing figuring out how to calculate a robot, how the government will distribute taxes, etc. That one is a mess impossible to get support for and nearly impossible to transition to.
The other idea, put forth by the Democracy in Europe 2025 party, is called a universal basic dividend, which essentially says that to make AI owned by humanity, the utility of automation should be calculated, and as a result, a dividend will be paid out (just like any other stock holder) which is a percent of that company's profit derived from automation. It becomes part of the corporate structure, rather than a government structure, so this one I think kinda has merit on paper, but likewise zero motivation to implement until it's virtually too late
The only solution I can come up with to this conundrum is if the output of the AGI is provided for free to people so the value is captured directly without the intermediating commercial steps. However, there will still be friction in this process (in the form of physical inputs) so I don't see how this is a long term sustainable approach.
Good thing I don't believe in AGI so this is, at best, a philosophical debate.
Valuations deemed too low (attempted tax evasion) can be challenged by the government by calling an owner's bluff and forcing sale to the highest bidder at the price set by the second highest bidder.
In one of the episodes, Detective Joe Friday spoke with some computer technicians in a building full of computers (giant, at the time). Friday asked the computer technician,
> "One more thing. Do you think that computers will take all our jobs one day?"
> "No. There will always be jobs for humans. Those jobs will change, maybe include working on and maintaining computers, but there will still be important jobs for humans."
That bit of TV stuck with me. Here we are 60 years later and that has proven true. I suspect it will still be true in 60 years, regardless of how well AI advances.
Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI and current CEO of Anthropic, notes[0] a similar sentiment:
> "First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI’s are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”.
Amodei does think that eventually we may need to eventually organize economic structures with powerful AI in mind, but this need not imply humans will never have jobs.
Basically the same dynamic that you see in e.g. customer support. A company’s founder is going to be better than your typical tier 1 support person at every tier 1 support task, but the founder’s time is limited and the opportunity cost of spending their time on first-contact support is high.
None of these people live with empathy, they are all on their own narrative which if it does account for other people is them trying to speed run the story path where everyone hero worships them.
I think a lot of people confuse AGI with infinite AGI.
No, you’re confusing finite AGI for an AGI that can only compete with a single person at a time.
In a world of AGI better-than-humans at both A and B, it’s a whole lot cheaper to replicate AGI that’s better at A and B and do both A and B than it is to employ human beings who do B badly.
Look up into the sky tonight. That glowing white-ish disk is made of the resource constraints, and is a tiny fraction of the resources available.
It may be a finite quantity of resources, but with regards to the economic impact it's enough that it may as well be infinite compared to what humans can do… and what we can experience as a consumer. I mean, sure, a McKendree cylinder is bigger than an O'Neill cylinder, but the scale of what's being suggested by AGI is literally everyone getting their own personal fleet of 60 or so O'Neill cylinders — enough to spend a lifetime exploring, to be a playground for anything any of us want. Demand gets saturated.
And even that's not enough.
From the other side of the equation, we humans have a basic energy cost to staying alive.
There are already domains where AI can do things for energy costs so low that it isn't "economical" to pay for the calories needed to keep a human brain conscious long enough to notice that it has seen the result, much less to do that task.
Should that become true across all domains, there's no comparative advantage to keeping us alive. Hide the farm where your food grew behind PV, disassemble the sand and clay in the soil into constituent atoms and use the silicon to make more compute or more power.
If all the money ends up in one place, from one single person to an entire group, if they have no need to spend any of it ever because the robots they control will make everything for them, then the rest invent a replacement currency and contine their own disconnected economy without the results of the automation.
But the very fact that some person or group is capable of hoarding all the money because they no longer need to spend it, means they have no real reason to care if it's taken away or diluted by government orders for "inflationary" (in this case more like "anti-deflationary") money printing.
How well that new economy works for those without automation is difficult to guess and depends on what real resources (if any, currency in the abstract doesn't count but precious metals might) get monopolised by those with automation, though the transition to it would likely be disruptive.
But that disconnect only happens when the robots can, amongst other things, make more robots (if robots can't do that then humans get paid to make robots), at which point money as we use it today stops being relevant — if I had such automation, it stops mattering to me if my tenants pay rent or not, irregardless of if they have that automation themselves, and I can tell a robot to make another robot and then give it to my tenant without meaningful loss to myself.
I suspect and hope there's gonna be a lot more Luigi Mangione's coming about soon, though.
We're going to continue watching the rapid AI-driven annihilation of the demand for human customer support specialists. They are just the first major rung of the ladder to fall.
Without protections, even UBI, it's hard to imagine things getting safer for anyone.
If AGI labor is cheaper and as effective as human labor, prices will drop to the point where the necessities cost very little. People will be able to support themselves working part-time jobs on whatever hasn't been automated. The tax system will become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative income tax. People will still whine and bitch about capitalism even as it negates the need for them to lift a single finger.
Small point of contention here, but 100% of people die, and 'street people' exceptionally quickly.
>The tax system will become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative income tax.
And when the productive economy profits from automation while the government tax revenue decreases from lost income tax, what do you think this arbitrary money printing will do to the USD?
Why would I hire a part time worker when I could hire an AI for cheaper? When I said categorically, I meant it.
1. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-poverty-fourth-greate...
Misquoting someone to prove a point is intellectually bankrupt. Take a breath and calm down. Why don't you try stealmanning instead?
> Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?
That assumes anything remains that hasn't been automated.
The "G" in "AGI" means different things to different people, because generality isn't really a boolean that you have or don't have, but if the AGI has a G at least as general as human intelligence, then everything we can do will be automated.