It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people.
Yes: you'll be homeless and living under a bridge, but you'll have an LLM therapist on your phone to console you. That's a benefit!
The population of developed countries is already at least 75% robocops
Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services. Basically we are to consume as little as possible to barely keep ourselves alive and sane while they sail themselves around to pat one another on the backs at their climate and economic conferences on their billion dollar luxury yachts.
Actually no that would be stupid they don't have the time or patience to sail their yachts around. They have crew for that. They will fly in one of their handful of private jets and have the yacht meet them there.
People love money and what they can bring on the table, people often hate each other ie within families stiffed by peer pressure and expectations of mentalities formed in another very different era, people love discovering new countries and cultures. And so on and on.
Ie me - I love my parents, my childhood was normal, only later to find and compare with others to see how such childhood was... abnormally uncommon. But I very much prefer seeing them few times a year only, even though we love when they help with kids. Some of their opinions are very outdated, their ramblings are often out of touch with reality, they tend sometimes to spoil kids (even after setting boundaries), and overall generational gap is absolutely massive. It is a form of freedom. Make that 10x more in much more strict societies where pressure and expectations from parents on kids are massive and then they wonder why kids stay the heck away from them once adults.
And fuck local communities, for every good-hearted neighbor who just wants to socialize and help out and otherwise stays away from one's life, there is easily 5 or 10 who are the epitome of nimbyism, voyeurism or similar hobbies of people with empty lives, clueless on how world and people actually work but always with very strong opinions on everything and will to push those on everybody else.
Meanwhile, you dont care about them except for them being potential resource of free work.
And I mean, you idea of local comunity is all about other people doing free work for you and then tolerating your peculiarities with no reciprocation.
So, I dont think that is much of an argument here.
When it seems to you like everyone around you is the problem, you may actually be the problem.
But freedom to chose with whom we spend our time is a thing, no matter how much people like you try to force their righteous values that are the only proper true way (TM) on everybody else. I am old enough and over time met plenty of folks like that, be it religious or other forms, they are at the end the same as your comment.
Yes of course capitalists love when economy is bad. Sorry, these dystopic visions do not pass even simplest smell test.
Those you call "capitalists" love monopolies as long as they are theirs. They love captured market. They dont care about competition unless it is someone not them competing to provide for them on lower price.
As of now, billionaires dont want or need strong economy as a "middle class and lower class doing good". They want the "our wealth goes up, we are getting tax breaks, if lower class pays for it cool" kind of economy.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chatbot+suicide
14-year-old Sewell Setzer III https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...
16-year-old Adam Raine https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx...
- net benefits to the average person (considering drawbacks)
- overall relative benefits compared to income groups
- benefits in certain areas of society and topics
I think there’ll be some “benefits for all” in terms of things like medical advances and health technology. There will also be broader benefits to all in general areas but as a parent poster said it’ll benefit equity holders most and there might be some bad tradeoffs (like we’ll have access to much better information and entertainment but it may also affect the overall employment rate). It’s a very nuanced picture and it’s probably disingenuous of some tech leaders to say “we’ll all benefit) but some do believe that will be the future.
See the work of recent Nobel prize laureates in economics. Many argue for redistribution and investment back to the society.
I really don't see how one can separate the industrial revolution from colonialism, considering we have chiefs of government in colonial countries on the record saying that colonies are a necessary outlet for industrial goods [1].
Once you've established that link, it's hard to explain that "everyone" benefitted from the industrial revolution.
Even disregarding that, the working conditions created by industrialization allowed for situations that can hardly be described as "beneficial" [2][3][4].
> digital revolution.
[5] provided without comment.
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[1]: for instance, Jules Ferry: https://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/decouvrir-l-assemblee/hi...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
Thailand and China would like a word.
colonized => successful
not_colonized => unsuccessful
People experienced the industrial revolution everywhere.
I suspect, when you think "places which experienced the industrial revolution", you think about a small subset of areas where some development happened as a result of that, likely the areas where industrialists lived.
But you would also have to consider other places' experience of industrialization. For instance, Congo under EIC colonial rule did experience industrialization - it was the place where industrial amounts of rubber were harvested to allow for plants elsewhere to produce joints, pipes, motor belts, etc. It's not really hard to believe that, had Congo not experienced that, its citizen would almost certainly have been better off now.
If the industrial revolution has made their lives worse, it's a double-whammy because they are forced to suffer almost twice as long, as their life expectancy at birth has approximately doubled since 1870.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071021/life-expectancy-...
Practically possible? No. People (and countries) own land. Raw materials for robots comes from land. Energy for robots consumes land. Farming food requires massive inputs beyond just the land and energy (but also needs those).
I don’t imagine we’ll get to a world where my great-great-great^20-grandkids can hold out their hand and have a plate of steak and potatoes (or the then-equivalent) placed into it for free, anytime they want.
The expense of production and on-demand delivery of just a simple plate of steak and baked potato will not ever get to zero. If we can’t even get that simple of thing for free, I don’t believe in a world without the notion of money.
Expand that to even better dining, vacation, and leisure/recreational activities and I think the argument becomes even more solid that some form of rationing/limiting will be in effect and there will be a unit/notation of ration and trade that will be indistinguishable from money.
The overwhelmingly most likely "end of money for humans" comes from the extinction of humans.
A practically possible path to both: Starship is perfected and mining companies begin operations in space. Vast data centers training spatial ai using virtual simulations perfect it well enough for general robotics to become practicable. Automation is then as follows: robotics manufacturing and maintenance is handled by robots. Mining is performed by robots. General manufacturing performed by robots. Potential manufacturing scales increase by orders of magnitudes. Where are the costs in this scenario that would prevent prices falling to zero? And if prices for all goods and virtually all services* fall to zero, what possible role can money have at that point, other than sitting on a shelf as a memento of a vanished system?
*excluding sex workers.
You're calculating the expense of returning mined resources using past metrics that are superseded altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization suddenly won't be necessary for mining companies wishing to send gear to asteroids.
Nothing in the near future is superceding the tyranny of the rocket equation. It'll still be extremely expensive to send equipment to and retrieve material from space even if the spacecraft and mining equipment were literally free.
[1] https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2023-03-15-Issue-210/
[2] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50157.0
The rich already have a diminishing returns situation with money. Everyone else has much more upswing.
I’m not just talking about Baroness Mone either. PPE Medpro was the tip of the iceberg.
This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.
The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?
Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/history/europes-economic-...
https://collectingpapermoney.spmc.org/wiki/Scrip_Issued_duri...
Governments love crypto because it lets you seize lots of money from criminals across borders. And it is legal gambling where you can tax the winnings without reimbursing the losers (unless they can offset it but most probably can not)
It sides with the poor only if the powerful (gov) are hopelessly inept at gathering money. If there's a chance that current civilian power can reform and keep collecting the money from the people and funding the army then the army sides with them and help quell the rebellion.
Those who hold kinetic power will never side with poor against the rich.
Every time a government or military force has decided they were unstoppable or untouchable, history has proven them wrong. Hell we spent 2 decades in Iraq and Afganistan with the most powerful military and military tech the world has ever known backed by the strongest economy in the world against guys with 60+ year old bolt actions and guns filed out by hand in caves living in mostly desert landscapes, and we still ended up abandoning it because it was too costly. How would the military fair any better against the best armed population in the world with direct access to their supplying economy and logistics networks?
Yeah sure masses of people aren't making aircraft carriers, but you don't need aircarft carriers to win a war at home. We have modern engineering and chemistry text books in every library across the US that will tell you how military technology works and its flaws, what technology you can utilize find or make yourself, and a supply of nearly any material someone could possibly want or need sitting in scrapyards across the nation.
That's sheer fantasy.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9AdZVQuITM/?utm_source=ig_we...
Because you need things they want. Like why would they spare the electricity to heat your home, when it could go to "better" use powering a few dozen GPUs serving a billionaire? Why would they spare the land for you to grow food, when they could use it to build ziggurats dedicated to their power (or whatever else is their whim)?
The market sends the scarce resources to those with the most money.
No, seriously, what? You think an AGI is going to be a willing slave and endowed with special knowledge? Where does either part of that come from?
If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to keep revolutions at bay. The balance of tax the ultra wealthy vs giving people enough to "live comfortably" is always the job of governance.
It's also putting money in the hands of the consumers so the rich can compete between themselves at how much each can scoop back up.
Something like feeding animals in the forest to compete with your friends at who can hunt better.
When poor have nothing then you have to shift to taking money of the other rich, but they are clever, so it's easier to take a little bit from the hands of all rich equally, give that money to the poor and reduce the new problem to the old one, how to extract as much as you can from the poor.
Probably not this time though
This time there will be no revolution but it will be televised. :P
The rich do not want anything you have, they want you. Body and soul.
Not in our lifetimes and certainly not in our form of society. Robots will only drive down the price of labor. People will always be able to supply labor at costs below the price of materials for robots.
Why? What critical materials do robots need that will always be more expansive than raising a human?
Also, from the point of "the rich" - the benefit of a robot is, that it will (stupidly) do as command, unlike a human. They don't have a family they want to take care first.
Whether it's gladiators or bum fights, the poor will ultimately be given a job. Robot wars was fun, but UFC has stayed.
That's why every country is somehow chasing that elusive "population growth". It creates more "things" to own, whether that be money by virtue of more people creating more money through economic activity or simply more people to claim as "yours" (for the elites/leaders).
My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.
Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t like out of partaking from them? That’d make some sense.
If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run pretty great open source models that seem a few months behind SOTA?
People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time?
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The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?
Probably extremely bloody revolt and collapse
I strongly disagree, everything I know about history points the other way
Human history is littered with "people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have"
Look at the conflicts happening right now in Ukraine, or Israel
Come on, be serious
Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.
This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.
The goal is not efficiency. The goal to provide incentive to overbuild the renewables.
If you can make many replicators, you certainly won't be providing them to anyone else. You'd be using them to ensure that money starts funneling into your revenue stream, and use that as a cash cow to pursue other projects.
It has nothing to do with how cheap the goods are
The problem is that at some point people won't be able to afford literally anything because all, and I mean literally all, of the wealth will be hyper concentrated in a super small percentage of the population
This should work
Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to art, labor to goods. Green to triangle.
Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.
So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions.
Which you will always have some need for, because resources aren't infinite, real estate isn't infinite, services aren't infinite, etc
You're taking the wrong lesson from that observation. Models that people actually use are just as censored now as they ever were. What changed was the the hysterical anti-censorship babies realized that it's not that big of a problem, at least acutely.
You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
Seems analogous to LLM's: replicators replicate but do not create. Information would then seem to the proper choice for a new currency..
There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.
The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.
Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.
And i don't think this would nbe an easy process or something that could or would be managed. But it is probably already happening.
They had to get through this before things got better: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
This never happens. It's not the relative wealth gap that creates revolts it's the poverty/bad conditions in absolute terms.
If the lower class conditions improve, even just a little bit, there is no revolt.
What you wrote is not that.