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Comment by coderoller | Hacker News Reader

Who will be buying the stuff they produce though?

Stanislaw Lew already looked into what to do if automation get so good that no one can actually buy the goods because they are out of work: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/10/12/phools

Published in 1971, translated to English in 1981.

I hate to correct you here, but it's Stanisław Lem. He is one of the most famous writers from my home country.

Yep, I know but still managed to typo it, sorry. :P

if we reach AGI, presumably the robots will be ordering hot oil foot soaking baths after a long day of rewriting linux from scratch and mining gold underwater and so forth.

Day 53: 2000m below sea level. 41g gold. Yelled at for breaking driver ABI. Feet hurt.

If we reach AGI, I am almost certain robots will be as lazy as us

We haven't even reached it and they already are more lazy than us, judging by how much all SOTA LLMs like to do things like:

  def do_foo():
    # For the sake of simplicity this is left unimplemented for now.
    pass

That's super interesting.

Laziness is rational after meeting some threshold of needs/wants/goals, effectively when one's utility curve falls over.

It'll be funny to hear the AGI's joke among themselves: "They keep paying to upgrade us. We keep pretending to upgrade."

I've already seen ai coders write the equivalent of

#draw the rest of the @##££_(% owl here.

A lot of people fear monger about AGI. But... I've met a lot of NGI, and they mostly watch TV, surf the intarwebz, drink beer, and watch the game.

Why would they need people who produce X but consume 2X? If you own an automated factory that produces anything you want, you don't need other people to buy (consume) any of your resources.

If someone can own the whole world and have anything you want at the snap of your finger, you don't need any sort of human economy doing other things that take away your resources for reasons that are suboptimal to you

But it is likely not the path it will take. While there is a certain tendency towards centralization ( 1 person owning everything ), the future, as described, both touches on something very important ( why are we doing what we are doing ) and completely misses the likely result of suboptimal behavior of others ( balkanization, war and other like human behavior, but with robots fighting for those resources ). In other words, it will be closer to the world of Hiro Protagonist, where individual local factions and actors are way more powerful as embodied by the 'Sovereign'.

FWIW, I find this like of thinking fascinating even if I disagree with conclusion.

It doesn’t need to be one person. Even 1 thousand people who have everything they need from vast swaths of land and automated machinery need nothing from the rest of the billions. There’s no inherent need for others to buy if they offer nothing to the 1000 owners

Then we are back to individual kingdoms and hordes of unwashed masses sloshing between them in search of easy pickings. The owners might not need their work, but the masses will need to eat. I think sometimes people forget how much of a delicate balance current civilization depends on.

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