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Comment by llamaimperative | Hacker News Reader

> Over time, in fits and starts, the steady march of human innovation [alongside monumental efforts of risk mitigation of each new innovation] has brought previously unimaginable levels of prosperity and improvements to almost every aspect of people’s lives.

Anyway, AI/AGI will not yield economic liberation for the masses. We already produce more than enough for economic liberation all over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened. Why? Snuck in here:

> the price of... a few inherently limited resources like land may rise even more dramatically.

This is really the crux of it. The price of land will skyrocket, driving the "cost of living" (cost of land) wedge further between the haves and have-nots.

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This is a great point. Life is tough because we are all competing in a game. Tweaking the rules of the game so that each basket is worth more points doesn’t make the game easier for any player.

From Henry George:

> Now, to produce wealth, two things are required: labor and land. Therefore, the effect of labor-saving improvements will be to extend the demand for land. So the primary effect of labor-saving improvements is to increase the power of labor. But the secondary effect is to extend the margin of production. And the end result is to increase rent.

> This shows that effects attributed to population are really due to technological progress. It also explains the otherwise perplexing fact that laborsaving machinery fails to benefit workers

>explains the otherwise perplexing fact that laborsaving machinery fails to benefit workers

I disagree, the reason why workers don’t benefit is because they are mostly paid to put hours in. Owners claim the gains of better machinery because they reason it is a capital investment at the business level.

Really I don’t see why see why this is perplexing. What is really perplexing is that some economists thought that productivity gains would somehow accrue gains for workers.

You say this isn't perplexing while commenting on an article by one of the most important people in industry repeating exactly this fallacy?

HN is full of people who happily and earnestly propagate this "obvious" falsehood.

> Anyway, AI/AGI will not yield economic liberation for the masses. We already produce more than enough for economic liberation all over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened.

In Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics, he studies work time of hunter gatherer tribes in Africa, Papua New Guinea, the Amazon etc. They often less work less than 40 hours a week. The hunter gatherer painting in caves in Chauvet seemed to have leisure time. Less hours than some fresh college grad pounding out C++ or C# for Electronic Arts any how.

The past 50 years has seen the hourly wage stay flat while the profit workers create is sucked up by the heirs.

Paying for four years if college to get a CS degree, then studying Leetcode, interning, working cheap as an associate/junior used to be seen as a good path, but obviously since late 2022 this has stagnated for most.

> The past 50 years has seen the hourly wage stay flat while the profit workers create is sucked up by the heirs.

Are you sure?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N

The reality is that so much wealth has been created that the US has seen rising wages AND rising inequality, with an increasing proportion of growth ending up benefiting capital, not labour.

Wait, that chart shows a 30% growth in family income. For a per-worker income comparison you'd need divide by the increase in dual-income families. Which has also increased by about 30% since 1975.

Actually, real median personal income has increased 50% since 1975: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

I believe you may have seen some number somewhere, it would be useful to have that to silence detractors.

How do you reconcile personal income going up 50% with family income going up only 30% and dual income families going up 30% over the same timespan? Are these really tracking the same thing?

Also, I don't understand what you mean about silencing detractors. What number are you saying it would be useful to have? The number of dual income families? That data is available from many sources, eg: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/america-has-becom...

> Paying for four years if college to get a CS degree, then studying Leetcode, interning, working cheap as an associate/junior used to be seen as a good path, but obviously since late 2022 this has stagnated for most.

What?

Go to a state school, median amount is ~11k a year. Then study Leetcode for a month (free or $35). Buy Cracking the Coding Interview ($33 new). Get a job as a software engineer making a median wage of $140k

Only on HN could someone see this opportunity set and think it's stagnated.

https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/average-cost-of...

https://builtin.com/salaries/us/software-engineer

Can you define what you mean by economic liberation? For most of economic history, I think the definition would have been freedom from famine and slavery and I think on both counts we've been wildly successful. Both basically only occur in failed states, where there's either no government at all (Somalia, Sudan, parts of Iraq and Syria) or the government is an authoritarian dictatorship (North Korea, Venezuela)

I ask, because I think you might be overestimating the ability of the current global system to produce "economic liberation", depending upon what you mean. A rough estimate of GDP per capita would put it at ~$20K if you adjust for purchasing power, less than $15K if you don't. That's well below what most people in the developed world would consider to be free of burden or worry and it assumes a completely equal distribution of all production, which is obviously unreasonable.

We need to continue to push the ball forward in growing wealth by continuing to improve productivity, which is going to require continued advancements in technology like mass adoption of AI.

Oh sure, I'm not one of those "the world is so awful" people. We've made immense progress on a lot of very important dimensions.

Fair point on the current output not producing enough to really give people their time back.

And yes I agree, we should continue pushing productivity forward. My point is only that productivity growth by itself does not necessarily yield anything close to the optimal distribution of its benefits. In fact we have good reason to believe that higher tiers of technology which produce more technological leverage owned by fewer and fewer people are naturally antagonistic to optimal distribution of its benefits.

I'll take a fairly expansive definition of "optimal distribution" here to just say we should shoot at least for a distribution of wealth that is socially and politically stable for a free society in the long run.

>A rough estimate of GDP per capita would put it at ~$20K if you adjust for purchasing power, less than $15K if you don't.

Is that spread across only working adults or does it include children? A better metric to examine might be per family, if you have it.

> Can you define what you mean by economic liberation?

Not having to work outside of providing basic necessities for yourself and the rest of humanity.

As for GDP - economists have been embarrassing and discrediting themselves for decades - please don't cite their propaganda in discussions about the real world.

You need to measure real world things. Can we grow enough food, can we build enough shelter, can we transport goods, can we make clothes, basic medicine? Without working 40 hours/week? The answer should be obvious.

This insane talk of productivity is more economist propaganda. We've been plenty productive for a long time. The problem is an incompetent elite and a populace that continues to not believe their lying eyes, citing 'experts'.

a) to be free from the enforcement of someones desperate desire to hard-code envy into children via products, ads and media

b) to not have schools and teachers filter and then reinforce pupils for jobs that serve class construction

c) to make sure that every kid can get it's near infinite and non-hazardous (before creative construction) LEGOs that they can play with in peaceful environments where fathers and mothers have enough on their accounts to provide peaceful and unhealthy-stress-free environments and food and water

c) so that anyone can at least try long enough, if they so wish, to become a polymath scientist, artist and craftsman, and if it doesn't work out, to never have to be angry at some pre-emptively envious people who create and abuse crisis to drive pointlessly higher and higher prices that are NOT supported by any logic or otherwise reasonable justification

> The price of land will skyrocket

Is that really true?

Let's look at some data from Google, the World Bank, etc.:

     US land area: 3,532,316 square miles

     US population: 334.9 million

     640 acres per square mile

     ( 640 * 3,532,316 ) / 334,900,000 =
     6.750 acres per person

     Fertility rate: 1.66 births per woman
     (2022) World Bank

     GDP growth rate: 2.5% annual change
     (2023) World Bank

So, per family of four, that would be

     ( 4 * 640 * 3,532,316 ) / 334,900,000
     = 27 acres per family of four

"Skyrocket?" With the fertility rate of 1.66, the US population is falling so that the acres per person is increasing.

A guess is that people are crowded into tall buildings in dense cities to reduce costs of communications. So, yes, in dense cities, the cost of land per acre is comparatively high.

But the Internet is reducing the costs of communications meaning that people can move to land that is less densely populated and cheaper.

So, for the near future, tough to believe:

> The price of land will skyrocket

If this logic worked, all land and therefore rent would currently be ~free since there's ample open space all over the continent.

The price of land is set by the productivity of it. Productivity goes up (by increased density, public infrastructure, private investment, or technological advancement) -> price of land goes up.

Actually, the part that that person was focusing on was that the fertility rate is below the replacement rate. Yeah, if we also decrease our immigration rate, our population could peak out even in a decade or two: https://www.axios.com/2023/11/09/us-population-decline-down-...

"Price of land goes up": In simple terms, the Internet is providing huge areas of land suddenly now feasible for use; the larger supply will lower US average costs per acre.

Empirically hasn't happened. It turns out people enjoy being near other people, so actually the increase in productivity has outstripped preference for less-dense living.

This is a key point. Given current overall levels of economic productivity, we should all be working 3-4 day weeks, at most.

To whom do the benefits of all this newfound efficiency accrue?

To the 1%? Just look at the historic wealth distribution chart. It’s wild.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Uni...

> We already produce more than enough for economic liberation all over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened. Why?

Because directing material resources towards that end requires a certain aggregate amount of willing/aligned general intelligence, which we simply don't have as a society. Failure after failure of socialist states demonstrate that human general intelligence is on average, uninterested in working towards the greater good. AGI won't have such limitations.

The blog post even addresses this: "the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy constrain a lot of things".

However, I actually do agree with you, but for a different reason. AGI is highly unlikely to yield economic liberation for the masses. Not because we won't have the intelligence capacity, but because the iota of people that will have their hands on the levers of power will in all likelyhood be uninterested in tending to the masses of now economically useless people.

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