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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

> I’m about 95% sure that will be terrible for the vast, vast majority of humans, we'll be obsolete.

This isn't a criticism of you, but this is a very stupid idea that we have. The economy is mean to serve us. If it can't, we need to completely re-organize it because the old model has become invalid. We shouldn't exist to serve the economy. That's an absolutely absurd idea that needs to be killed in every single one of us.

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> we need to completely re-organize it because the old model has become invalid

that's called social revolution, and those who benefit from the old model (currently that would be the holders of capital, and more so as AI grows in its capabilities and increasingly supplants human labor) will do everything in their power to prevent that re-organization

The economy isn't meant to serve us. It's an emergent system that evolves based on a complex incentive structure and its own contingent history.

Economic activity is meant to serve us. Don't be a pedant.

But surely you can see that the economy does not serve us. Who is "us", anyway?

The economy, and the worldwide technological system that it fuels, behaves like its own organism with its own ultimate goal unbeknownst to us.

By looking around you, is it not perfectly clear to you too that it does not have anything to do with the well-being of people?

People work to eat. You missed the point entirely. I refer you to my first post on this.

Nevertheless the modern economy has been deliberately designed. Emergent behaviors within it at the highest levels are actively monitored and culled when deemed not cost effective or straight out harmful.

The problem is no one is talking about this. We’re clearly headed towards such a world, and it’s irrelevant whether this incarnation will completely achieve that.

And anyone who poo poos ChatGPT needs to remember we went from “this isn’t going to happen in the next 20 years” to “this is happening tomorrow” overnight. It’s pretty obvious I’m going to be installing Microsoft Employee Service Pack 2 in my lifetime.

Very true but the question, as always, is by what means we can enact this change? The economy may well continue to serve the owner class even if all workers are replaced with robots.

Workers have been replaced with machines many times over the last 250 years, and these fears have always been widespread, but never materialized.

I concede that this time it could be different, but I'd be very surprised while I starved to death.

I think the options are pretty clear. A negotiation of gradual escalation: Democracy, protests, civil disobedience, strikes, sabotage and if all else fails then at some point, warfare.

The economy is meant to serve some people; some people take out of economy more than they give, some people give more than they take.

A position shared by both Lenin and Thatcher

Great theory. In reality the vast majority us serves only the economy without getting anything truly valuable in return. We serve it only, with noticing it, to grow into less human and more individual shells of less human. Machines of the Economy.

This doesn't engage with the problem of coordinating everyone around some proposed solution and so is useless. Yes, if we could all just magically decide on a better system of government, everything would be great!

Identifying the problem is never useless. We need the right understanding if we're going to move forward. Believing we serve the economy and not the other way around hinders any progress on that front and so inverting it is a solid first step.

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